By David Gewirtz
Office 2003 introduced a new, very interesting feature for those who need to stay in touch with their business relationships: Business Contact Manager (or BCM). BCM integrates into Outlook 2003 and offers many of the same relationship/CRM (Customer Relationship Management) features you'd find in ACT! or GoldMine.
Unfortunately, BCM is explicitly not supported for those users who get their email via an Exchange server. As a result, if you're an Exchange user, you're not going to be able to use BCM.
Until now. It turns out, you can install Business Contact Manager, even if you're an Exchange user. You just can't install it into the Outlook Profile that is connecting to the Exchange server.
To get around this restriction, create a new profile. This will create a new, local .PST file on your computer. Then install Business Contact Manager and select the local, non-Exchange profile. You'll wind up creating a separate block of contacts in this local profile, but since you can copy and paste contacts between the profiles, it's a small price to pay to be able to use this very helpful CRM tool.
