Outlook and MAPI providers

Although BCM shows up in Outlook, and is well integrated in the user interface, there's a important distinction between the two.

The Outlook program is a user interface for data stores and messaging systems - both types of MAPI providers - and Outlook can host multiple MAPI providers. In your Outlook folder view you may see several top level nodes: Mailbox, Archives, Public Folders, SharePoint Lists, Business Contact Manager, etc. Each of those is a different MAPI store. Because some program (e.g. Outlook Connector, ActiveSync) synchronizes the Mailbox store, it doesn't mean it will sync BCM, or any other store.

This is usually a surprise to new users of ActiveSync, Outlook Connector, and other programs to synchronize Outlook with devices (PDAs, Smartphones) or the cloud. Most of these programs were designed to synchronize the Mailbox only. A proper contacts synchronizer for Outlook would ask you which MAPI stores and folders you want to synchronize, instead of only synchronizing the Contacts folder in the Mailbox store.

.NET Reflector news

.NET Reflector, an essential tool if you are trying to figure out how managed applications - like BCM - do their stuff, has moved to Redgate.

How to manually uninstall packages

Sometimes uninstalling a package from Add/Remove Programs (ARP) fails because of an error in the package's setup program, or the package is gone from ARP, but there are indications it is still installed - for example, running setup to reinstall jumps straight to the maintenance mode.

Windows tracks all installed packages in the Registry, in HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall. Run regedit and go to that location. From that node search (menu: Edit|Find...) for the package (e.g., "Business Contact Manager"). For each one that you find, get the value of the UninstallString key (generally: "msiexec /X{...some GUID...}" or a Setup.exe command line) and run it.

That should remove the packages from the machine. After removing a package, refresh (F5) regedit.

If that doesn't remove everything, you can proceed to manually removing BCM files.

BCM cheatsheet

I discovered this Business Contact Manager 2007 How-To laminated pamphlet this morning.