Mail Merges: Outlook BCM versus MS CRM

One of the things that can be a… well an all afternoon task, with Outlook Business Contact Manager turns out to be a 5 minute job with Microsoft CRM. One of the good things a decent CRM package should do is make a history record for each record that has been mail merged to.

With Outlook BCM when you would print several as a test to make sure things are printing correctly (as you always need to do) it would immediately add history to the contact records. Then when you would print it for real it would add them again…If you need to reprint it would…add them again… With MS CRM you are nicely asked if you want to add a task. (and you can even decide the text it uses and who is the owner)

Another common problem in BCM is that it would not add the history to every contact record you selected in the criteria. I could not figure out the records it left out—it appeared random. As with soo many other things MS CRM 4.0 seems to handle this smoothly and effeciently.