Business Contact Manager (BCM) to Microsoft CRM Online - what is Microsoft's strategy for BCM?

Pariveda just completed a Business Contact Manager (BCM) to CRM 2011 Online migration for one of Dallas based clients. The new CRM 2011 platform was met with strong and widespread adoption after the BCM experience. I’m actually quite surprised that our client was able to limp along with BCM for 3 years for a 50 user environment. I hate to knock my friends at Microsoft, but I’d like to understand the strategy for BCM. The tool is definitely not meant for an environment larger than 1-10 users.

 

Some of the challenges our client ran into with BCM include:

• Performance hits to Outlook using the BCM client – BCM causes the CRM client to crash constantly and even typing an email can be a painful experience. It was not uncommon for the COO to reboot Outlook several times each day.
• Limitations in custom fields – BCM limits the amount of custom/user defined fields to 40 total fields. While this may sound like a lot, they run out quicker than one might think.
• Limited filtering capability – Filters are built in the form of reports in BCM instead of dynamic queries. When you export these reports – you end up with all records and Excel hides the ones that are ‘filtered’ out. Your exported spreadsheet data requires manual clean up and editing thereby making the Excel export unusable.
• Restrictions on data export – BCM allows core Account and Contact entity data to be exported, but the associated Notes have to be extracted directly from the database and reformatted manually. Also, Leads and Opportunities are not easily extractable.

 

Based on this experience, I wonder if BCM was meant to be a feeder channel for Microsoft CRM. If that is the case, Microsoft should have addressed the data export functionality at a minimum. While CRM Online has a BCM data map, BCM does not allow easy export of notes data.  Providing more robust export tools would at least encourage BCM users an easy migration to Microsoft CRM, when their business needs matured. I’d love to hear from someone at the Microsoft BCM team on this one.