After you tell Outlook you want to use Business Contact Manager, you’ll notice some new additions to the toolbars and menus. Some menus just have added items, like the Actions menu. Some toolbars and menus are completely new.

 

One of the key items is the Business Tools menu, which you can see below. Let’s go over some of the options in this menu. We won’t go into the options in detail right now; this is just so you know where to find all of your business tools in one place.

 

-       Accounts: Opens the Business Accounts folder.

-       Business Contacts: Opens the Business Contacts folder.

-       Opportunities: Opens the Opportunities folder.

-       Reports: Use the sub-menu to generate different types of reports.

-       Accounting Tools: If you have Microsoft Small Business Accounting 2006 installed, you can set up a connection to it.

-       Product and Service Items List: A tool to help you manage pricing.

-       Business Services: Opens a Web site where you can purchase virtual marketing tools. (This currently links to Bcentral, Microsoft’s small business Web site.)

-       E-mail Marketing: Uses Microsoft List Builder to help you generate marketing e-mails.

-       Share Database: Starts the database sharing wizard.

-       Manage Database: Opens a tool to help you back up, restore, or check your database for errors.

-       Create or Select a Database: Add a new database to Business Contact Manager.

-       Manage E-mail Auto Linking: Lets you set options for linking e-mails to contacts and accounts.

-       Other: Open your Business History or Deleted Items folders.

 

We’ll get into all these features in detail later, but that’s a quick overview of the tools in Business Contact Manager.