Back to BCM after playing with CRM Live

I’ve been quite here about Outlook with Business Contact Manager (BCM) for a while because I had been playing around with Microsoft’s CRM Live early access edition. There were lots of things that I liked about CRM Live, but I’ve decided to delay implementing it in my business. The per user license fee is very competitive (between $39 – $59 per month) but in my mind it’s not really “per user – on demand” as there is a 5 user minimum and a 12 month commitment (with a penalty for early termination). I’m not saying the functionality isn’t worth the price, I just wish they’d call it what it is.

I think the $200 – $300 per month along with the 12 month commitment may give some true small business owners some pause (thats’ before spending time implementing it), so I think I’ll continue to post about using BCM for a while. I do think that as soon you have a remote employee who needs CRM functionality for their job, you should take a serious look at CRM Live.

After reinstalling BCM, I found this tip via the SBS Diva Blog about throttling SQL memory. I followed the recommendations in this post about 3 days ago and so far I haven’t experienced any of the mysterious system pauses that I’ve reported before.