How to get Microsoft support

Here's a page with the contact information for Microsoft support; for those situations where your mates can't fix it for you.

Why is Outlook 2007 so slow? (ongoing)

On one machine, Outlook startup went from forever to reasonable by deleting the file C:\Documents and Settings\wuming\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\outcmd.dat.

On another, Calendar items still take over a minute to open.

More here.

Look, I'm a star of the Lichtung variety!

mapisvc.inf can be a problem on Vista

Imagine Kitty had trouble installing BCM and worked around it by changing mapisvc.inf so that the user installing BCM could write to it.

PollingInterval

BCM checks (polls) the database regularly to see if any data has changed. This is expecially useful with shared databases, to automatically pickup changes others have made.

BCM's default polling interval has been one second. That's good in the sense that every BCM client picks up any changes within one second or so. But it can stress the database is there are many changes and every BCM client requeries the database to refresh folders and so. If the shared database is on your desktop you've probably noticed the performance difference from other users' BCM clients hitting the database.

In BCM v3 Service Pack 1 the polling interval was increased to one minute. That should decrease database activity in busy offices, but clients may not get updated with changes for a minute.

If you want play around with the polling loop frequency, you can set its value and experiment.

BCM checks in the Registry for a poll interval value, and uses that value if it finds one.

Add PollingInterval to the default BCM Registry folder for a user and give it a number value in seconds; i.e.:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Business Solutions eCRM\PollingInterval

Note that's in the user hive, so different users of a machine can set a PollingInterval without affecting other BCM users on that PC.

BCM packaged with Outlook 2007

Amazon's announces Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager.

And there's a new book too.

BCM on YouTube

Get Connected Office 2007 Business Contact Manager

and here's another flick about integrating with Office Accounting.