The challenge: how to have the organizations contacts easily available on the Blackberry handhelds and enhance the business processes.
Business Contact Manager, BCM, is an excellent entry level CRM application that integrates with Outlook and utilizes SQL to make contacts available offline and track communicates with a given contact or account. A central set of contacts/accounts can be created and then shared with the organization so as to create a centralized resource instead of having disparate contact groupings. While Exchange offers the ability to create shared address books, the organization and integration options are limited even compared to BCM.
MICROSOFT DYNAMICS CRM 4.0
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 provides organizations with a highly flexible customer relationship management (CRM) platform that can adapt, grow, and scale along with your business. Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 is based on a commitment to providing organizations with the Power of Choice to make it easy for you to evolve your business unencumbered by technology limitations. With tools to enhance your company’s marketing, sales, and customer service processes, a solid analytics platform, and native integration with the Microsoft® Office Outlook® messaging and collaboration client, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 helps you drive consistent and measurable improvement in everyday business processes.(1)
Solution Process
1. After exporting the contacts, in our client’s case they has not setup Accounts, the contacts were saved in a .csv format in a network store.
2. We then had to create a Field Translation template so that the BCM 2010 contact fields and information would be properly migrated into CRM 4.0 fields that are named slightly different in many cases.
3. A User was created to represent the Organisation and then the .csv file was imported and contacts applied through the Field Translation template.
4. Contacts then were shared to previously configured CRM Users and Group.
5. Users Outlook CRM setup was then configured to include a Local Data Group representing the Organisations contacts which resulted in the contacts syncing to the Outlook default contact list and then in turn to the Blackberry Handheld.
[1] https://partner.microsoft.com/global/productssolutions/dynamics/microsoftdynamicscrm/40062156