Microsoft’s Business Contact Manager will certainly increase in both popularity and usage with the firm’s recent announcement that it will offer Microsoft Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager as a standalone product.

Business Contact Manager (BCM) adds customer resource management (CRM) features to Outlook. Long-time users of Outlook already know that the package lets us manage contacts, e-mail, a calendar, and tasks.

Business Contact Manager extends those capabilities to add accounts, business contacts, and business opportunities (such as sales) to your Outlook data. These items appear under their own Business Contact Manager branch in the folder list. Since you are comfortable using Outlook, you can start tracking your business items with the same level of comfort.

Another great benefit of using Business Contact Manager is that it gives you the means to easily integrate all information about a customer account in one place. You can easily link e-mail, contacts, notes, documents, and other items related to an account and view and manage those items from a single point. The result is the capability to organize all account data in one location, quickly find information, and improve customer response.

For more information on Business Contact Manager, click here.