Microsoft Outlook 2003 with Business Contact Manager 2

That would be more forgivable if the application worked flawlessly, but there are many niggling areas in which the user interface of BCM simply becomes annoying. You have to click on the drop-down arrow to make drop-down lists open, and clicking in text looks like you can edit it but you can't, only select from the predefined list. Lists of values can't be changed either, so Territory can only be, for example, 'South', 'South East'. There's no way to add 'Scotland', 'Europe' or any other value. Some date values are presented in textboxes without any drop-down calendar and generate an error message if the user doesn't type a valid date and time. The form layouts are also fixed, so you can't add any other fields or remove or rearrange any fields.

So, ultimately, any business that relies on complex CRM will soon outgrow BCM's limited feature set and lack of extensibility. With such tight integration into Outlook, the foundation of a good product may be there, but when there are many, albeit paid for, alternatives that offer far more - most notably FrontRange GoldMine and Sage ACT! Professional - BCM is simply too underpowered to provide a serious alternative.

Author: Simon Jones