A replacement for Outlook Business Contact Manager (BCM) is rolling out to Office 365 Business Premium subscribers, beginning with those who have First Release enabled. Customer Manager uses Office 365 services to search your mailbox and store related information. At this time, it is only available on Business Premium subscriptions but will eventually be released to E3 and E5 subscriptions. Customer Manager uses Office 365 services to search your mailbox and store related information and will only be available to subscriptions that include both Office 365 software and services, as it requires both Outlook 2016 and Exchange Online mailboxes. It will not work with POP3, IMAP, or Outlook.com accounts.
While not as full-featured as BCM, it's more robust and should have fewer problems, with the only drawback being that it is limited to Office 365 business subscribers with a subscription that includes both the Office software and Exchange mailbox. Data is stored online and syncs to a new Outlook profile automatically.
When Outlook Customer Manager is enabled on your mailbox, a Customer Manager button shows up in the ribbon.
Clicking the button opens a pane on the right side of the mail folder and after logging in, you can create business contacts, create deals with or view activities (email, appointments, tasks, files) with the business contact or add notes to the contact. A timeline displays these activities in the pane.
Business contact details are not available in Outlook on the web, however, an iPhone app is available, giving you access to the business contact information on your phone. (An Android app will come later.)
To enable first release or to verify the setting, log into the Office 365 admin center then browse to Settings > Organization profile. The current first release settings are listed under Release preferences. If you need to change the setting, click Edit. To enable first release for all users in your organization, choose First release for everyone, or to enable it for some users, choose First release for selected users, and select the users. To disable first release, choose Standard release. After making your selection, click Next and complete the dialog. Don't forget to click Save to finalize and save changes.
Screenshots are available at Introducing Outlook Customer Manager—relationships made easy for small businesses (Office Blogs)
Migrate BCM to Customer Manager
Outlook MVP Eric LeGualt has a free BCM to Outlook Customer Manager (OCM) migration tool at BCM Migration Assistant. This utility automates migration of business contacts, accounts, and opportunities to OCM.
Key features of the BCM Migration tool:
- Migrate default business contacts, accounts, and opportunity fields to the equivalent OCM fields
- Map additional BCM fields to OCM custom fields
- Automatically migrate BCM opportunity stages and create new OCM deal stages
- Migrate Business Notes and Phone Log history to OCM activity timeline
Eric also offers paid migration services, if you want his help migrating BCM to Outlook Customer Manager.
Hello Diane, great articles... keep up the good work.
Question: Is there a hack or some way to use OCM with outlook these days? I hate the hoops MS drags us thru, Outlook 2007 did a great job of tracking activities, BCM was a pain in the rear and then they discontinued OCM... any suggestions?
OCM is completely gone - the backend was removed. There is a hidden folder in Outlook that holds contact data used by OCM (it will be removed soon) - but that is all that is left of it.
Hello, thank you for the insightful article. Is it possible to also import email history from BCM to OCM? This is arguably one of the most important features of BCM, and a lot of our client communication history is logged as email items that were auto-linked during send and receive. Thank you for your time!
It uses instant search, so you don't need to link mail. The utility at https://github.com/elegault/BCMMigrationAssistant#bcm-migration-assistant can import everything that can be imported.
Does instant search include email sent/received by other individuals in the organization? What about emails that don't actually exist anymore in a user's mailbox?
BCM logs emails as standalone items, so all the email history is available regardless of who sent/received the email and how long ago that was. Most of the original emails (and in some cases users) don't exist anymore, but BCM still keeps track of logged emails, and this makes up for 90% of the communication history that needs to be carried over to OCM.
Thank you.
Hi Diane, could you let me know if it's possible to bulk delete contacts from Outlook Customer Manager? I used Eric's tool to migrate contacts etc across from BCM (which worked brilliantly), but also imported the same contacts into Outlook Contacts as well - so I now have 2 versions of each contact, 1 private & 1 shared with OCM. I have tried deleting the Outlook Contacts in bulk (but they just keep on reappearing) and as I have close to 1700 unique contacts it would be too time consuming to delete them one by one. Any assistance would be much appreciated.
How long does it take for the contacts to reappear?
I've managed to stop the outlook contacts reappearing so that's one issue solved; the main problem however is I cannot bulk delete the contacts from OCM - any suggestions please? Thanks so much.
Offhand, I don’t think you can, but I’ll check on it. Will also see if Eric has any ideas (we’re both at the same conference this week).
Thank you - I think the issue has arisen because the migration tool imports into the OCM contacts folder & not the regular Contacts folder (MS tell me that manually added OCM contacts are stored as regular Contacts which then copy across to the OCM Contacts category when the 'business contact' switch is toggled - if it had done this I could bulk delete with no issue from the regular Contacts list. I don't know where the migration tool stores the imported contacts so I can't delete the file - I'd be happy to remove the lot & start with a clean database and just import manually into Contacts (rather than using the migration tool). Thanks again.
Hi Diane, thanks for your response. I have managed to delete the reappearing outlook contacts once & for all; now I just need to work out how to bulk delete the contacts in OCM. I would be happy to reinstall Outlook from scratch, or start with a fresh database (if that helps) as I have all the emails etc backed up ready to import. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks,
Reinstalling won’t help - the business stuff is stored online and syncs down. It needs cleared - I’m checking on the steps to do that.
it looks like the only way to delete business contacts is one at a time or using MFCMAPI. I'll write up the MFCMAPI instructions next week. (I'm out of town and mfcmapi won't run with the beta version of outlook i have installed on my laptop.)
Thanks so much for your assistance; look forward to reading the MFCMAPI instructions when you get the opportunity.
That was easy enough... open the profile in MFCMAPI. Double click on the account... Expand Root -Mailbox, expand IPM_subtree, then Contacts. Outlook Customer Manger folder is under the contacts folder. Double click on it. Select all (or the ones you want to delete), right click and choose Delete message. Click OK.
it takes a while for the deletions to show up in the Custom manager pane (in the Addins module).
Thanks so much, Diane - I've never used MFCMAPI before but your instructions were really clear so I decided to give it a go. Unwanted contacts deleted. All gone! I really appreciate your help :-D
Hi Diane!
OCM seems to be a right starting CRM point for us Outlook users.
Do you know if it is possible to import Journal entries from Outlook 2007 or xls in Outlook 2016 OCM as Timeline entries (notes or calls)?
Best regards / Efthimios
AFAIK, it's not possible, but if it can be done, Eric Legualt would know how, he wrote a scripot to import BCM to OCM. http://www.ericlegaultconsulting.com/blog/?p=3044