While looking through my web logs, I noticed a couple of folks came to my site looking for tips on how to schedule future calls with contacts in Outlook Business Contact Manager (BCM). In ACT! and other contact management software you schedule future activities. In BCM, you generally flag items for follow up, create tasks, or create appointments.
The way that I schedule follow up calls (I am using BCM 2007) is by setting up a follow up flag for the contact. With the contact record open, click on the Follow Up button on the ribbon, and choose Custom. From there, I set the type to Call, set my start date, and usually set a reminder. In BCM 2007, this creates a To-Do item for this contact. To-do items are new in Outlook 2007; I'm assuming that in BCM 2003 a task is created, but I don't have a copy of BCM 2003 running to verify this.
Using this method, you can only have one flag set at a time for a contact. Another option would be to create a new history item, a task or an appointment, for your contact. If you are a Getting Things Done (GTD) fan, you may want to use a task item combined with a category so that you can use the category view to see all of you phone calls in a group.
