Forum Discussion
Better Enterprise Contact Management
We are a relatively small company - 150 employees - all of who are using O365 for email.
Typically most employees never save their contacts - instead they rely on their auto-complete in outlook.
Our fear is some how their auto-complete is lost or corrupt - and now they have none of their contacts saved. Is there any tools out there that can, on an enterprise level, manage, or backup the autocomplete. Right now we have written scripts to backup the autocomplete file - but this solution seems so antiquated... just wondering what everyone else is doing.
We also don't have a great way of figuring out who our employees are in contact with if an employee leaves.
6 Replies
Just my tuppence worth, relying on auto-complete doesn't seem scalable and will be prone to these sorts of issues and hamper efficiency. If you are looking for an enterprise solution, check out Microsoft Dynamics 365 (previously known as Dynamics CRM Online), it's probably overkill and it's not cheap but its email integration with the Outlook app is right up there.
That's more of a behavioral problem, you simply need to teach the users to store the contacts in a central repository. Be it a shared contacts folder, SPO list, Public folder, whatever. For small business, Microsoft recently launched the Outlook Customer Manager app, you might want to look at it as well.
I wish all I had to do was train them - the problem is you can't rely on users to do anything. That's why we are hoping to find a more solid solution so the users don't have to think or click on anything.
The autocomplete is populated when they send email, wouldn't those emails still be in their sent items?
- True - we do have their emails - but we have had users who's auto complete have become lost. And without it they have to go search for an email and reply to generate a new email since they have no contact - it just takes too long.
Hi Shane Kelly - as shared by VasilMichev, If you are a Microsoft Office 365 Business Premium customer, you really should check out outlook Customer Manager (https://blogs.office.com/en-us/2016/11/14/introducing-outlook-customer-manager-relationships-made-easy-for-small-businesses/). It's a good fit for yoru needs, as it is looking at the people your users are communicating with and surfacing their contact information together with the content they are sharing and collaborating on. Definitely worth checking out.
