Office Live Small Business: Contact Manager Tutorial

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Office Live Small Business's Contact Manager stores Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, and Products as lists. You an customize the columns in these lists to suit your needs. But you can't attach documents to individual list items. Come to think of it, you'd frequently find the need to associate documents with these entities. You may sign a contract with a client and the most logical entity to store the contract document with would be the Account in Business Contact Manager.

Most high-end CRM or SFA applications let you make such associations. But Business Contact Manager is a considerably less complex application. Therefore, it doesn't let you associate documents with its list items. Instead, it sports its own document library where you can store client-, contact-, or product-related documents. This document library is called Business Documents.

Organizing Documents

Instead of storing all your documents in one large, messy folder, it makes sense to organize them into folders. You can create folders to suit the way you work. You may want to store documents by the entity type, such as clients and contacts, or by document type, such as contracts, proposals, and price lists.

Creating a Folder

To create a folder within Business Documents, follow these steps:

1. On Business Contact Manager's tab bar, click the Business Documents tab. The Business Documents list appears.
2. Pull down the New menu and click New Folder. The New Folder page appears. It has a single field for entering the name of your new folder.
3. Enter a name for your folder and click OK to return to the Business Documents List, which now shows the new folder.

Viewing Properties of a Folder

To View properties of a folder, follow these steps:

1. Hover your mouse pointer over the name of the folder in the Business Documents list. An actions menu appears around the folder name. Click on it to reveal the menu options.
2. Choose View Properties from the actions menu. The Folder Properties page appears.
3. You can see who created the folder and when, as well as who last updated the folder and when.
4. Click Close to return to the Business Documents list.

Viewing Contents of a Folder

1. Click on the name of the folder in the Business Documents list. Business Contact Manager displays contents of the folder.
2. This page doesn't have a direct link to return to the Business Documents list. You'll have to click on the Business Documents tab to return to the Business Documents list.

Adding files to a Folder

To add files to a folder, follow these steps:

1. Click on the name of the folder in the Business Documents list. Business Contact Manager displays contents of the folder.
2. Pull down the Upload menu and click Upload Document if you want to to upload a single document. To upload multiple documents, click Upload Multiple Documents.
3. Select the document(s) you wish to upload and click OK to view the contents of the folder which now include the documents you just uploaded.

Tracking Changes to a Folder with Alerts

If you want to receive an e-mail notification every time someone changes a document in a folder, you can set up an alert. To do so, follow these steps:

1. Hover your mouse pointer over Folder Name in the Business Documents list. An actions menu appears around the folder name. Click on it to reveal the menu options.
2. Choose Alert Me from the actions menu. The New Alert page appears.
3. A title for the alert, which appears as the subject of the e-mail, is already entered for you. Change it if you don't like it.
4. Your name appears automatically in the list of users to whom Business Contact Manager will send the alert. You can add more users to the list by clicking on the little address-book icon under the users box.
5. Choose the event that should generate the alert. You may only want to be notified when someone adds a new document to the folder, for example.
6. Schedule a time to receive the alert by choosing one of the options for When to send the alert.
7. Click OK to set the alert and return to the Business Documents list.

Deleting a Folder

To delete a folder, along with all its contents, follow these steps:

1. Hover your mouse pointer over the name of the folder in the Business Documents list. An actions menu appears around the folder name. Click on it to reveal the menu options.
2. Choose Delete from the actions menu. A message, warning you that all the content in the folder will be sent to the recycle bin, pops up.
3. Click OK to proceed with the deletion or Cancel to back out.