Allow different accounts to add the same business contact

[Guest]

I have office 2003 Pro SP1 with the business contact manager for outlook.
In the business contact manager you cannot add a business contact to more
than one account. I use accounts for my different jobs and often have
business contacts connected to different jobs. Not being able to use the
same contact in different accounts is a serious flaw from my perspective.
Making multiple copies of the same contact is a rediculous solution that you
might expect from a mediocre free-ware program. Having 35 copies of my
structural engineer's contact info in my contact list doesn't seem like the
sign of a well designed program.
Hopefully MS will fix this flaw.

 

[Luther]

In BCM Accounts represent companies and institutions, and Contacts
represent people who work at those Accounts.

Over time several several users have asked for a job or project entity
type in BCM similar to what you are looking for.

BCM v1 is clearly oriented towards sales force automation. The beta of
v2 indicates that they've expanded into broader Customer support (e.g.
linking Accounts and Opportunities to Accounting software) and general
functional improvements (e.g. database sharing, PDA sync, full fidelity
import/export).

Now is probably is good time to let Microsoft know that adding a Job
entity in v3 is important to you:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=114491

 

[BigDog]

Rob,

The link that Luther gave is a good one to voice your issue.
I have a similar issue that you can follow in this link.

http://groups-beta.google.com/group...read/thread/48497bdd47fd1885/cf55fc2c430b27b9

I did go to this link and let my comments/issues/requests.
Good Luck

Mark

 

[Guest]

YES YES - allow to do this.

Here is the thing - even though the account to contact in Business Contact
Manager is set up as a (one to many) relationship, I think that it needs to
be many to many because a contact can belong to so many different orgs - for
example:

I belong to an account as an employee of my company (possibly a decision
maker for my department, etc....) so I need to belong to my company XYZ
account.

I also am on the Board of Directors for a local non-profit (in fact, several
non-profits) - where I am also the decision maker for that account.

Potential Issue: when tasks and appointments are assigned, they need to be
referenced in both account and contact info (what about a dialog that gets
called when there is more than one account, to reference that account -
otherwise default to both (or many) accounts.

------------

The main issue here is I want to be able to list all the members of
different accounts when my contacts belong to more than one organization.
Real world says many to many Account-Contact relationship.

Just had a thought - here is a workaround - how about a view in the accounts
that allows just Account Contact relationships - so they could be viewed.
The contact could still be linked to a primary account, but then alternate
optional account relationships could then be set up. Just a thought.

 

[Guest]

Here is a super-crude workaround:

My crude workaround
is to create and maintain a permanently linked Outlook Task item to each
Account Record. On the subject line of each of these permanently linked
Task Records I simply type the same name as the Account it is linked to so
the association is easy to recognize. This constant link effectively then
makes available the additional Contact link field found in the lower left of
each Task record for linking additional Business Contacts. Thus, an
individual Business Contact Record can me linked to more than just 1 Account
record. It is NOT a direct link to the Account record rather, it is an
indirect one that links via the extended Outlook Contact field made available
through the permanently linked Task record. It is easy to Navigate back and
forth between the Account record and each additonal multiple linked Business
Contact record if I need to.

 

[Tim P via OfficeKB.com]

Russ,

Nice cut and paste job. There is another redundant thread from other users
on this same topic found by scrolling down this page further. The thread is
titled: "How to connect one contact to multiple accounts using Outlook BCM"

-THP

 

[Guest]

I'd like to add my vote to this suggestion, both for the Primary Contact and
for the entries in the Business Contacts window. A many-to-many relationship
between Contracts and Accounts is simply the reality that I have to libe with.