What's New in Contact Manager
Several changes and enhancements have been made to Contact Manager (formerly Business Contact Manager) in the latest release of Microsoft Office Live Small Business.
Significant changes were made in the following areas:
New ways to interact with Contact Manager data
New contacts list features
Enhancements to list design capabilities
New ways to access and display Contact Manager data on an outside Web site
Integration with Store Manager
Integration with E-Mail marketing campaigns
Integration with Contact Us modules
Interact with Contact Manager Data
The Contact Manager Web service is now available to allow solutions created for Microsoft Office Live Small Business to interact with Contact Manager data. For Contact Manager Web service documentation, see WebBCM.
New Contacts List Features
The Contacts list has been renamed Business Contacts. To view the schema for the Business Contacts list, see Business Contacts Schema.
The Accounts list has been renamed Companies. To view the schema for the Companies list, see Companies Schema.
The Contact Manager home page is now centered around the Business Contacts list to make this information more quickly accessible. This page is no longer a dashboard and Contact Manager dashboards customized in an earlier version of Office Live Small Business are no longer available.
A Personal Contacts list is now available, in addition to the Business Contacts list. The Personal Contacts list only appears in Contact Manager if the account holder has a Windows Live Hotmail account. Items in this list are stored in the Contacts folder in the Windows Live Hotmail account.
Contacts can now be put in categories called Contact Groups.
An activity log is stored as part of each contact's record in the Business Contacts list.
Search for contacts by the full name, or the first characters in the name, phone numbers, or e-mail addresses.
A contact preview pane next to the left navigation bar. Click a contact name, and key details about the contact appear prominently on your screen.
Enhanced List Design
You can use a List Publisher module to dynamically display the data from a list in Contact Manager on your public Web site. Now you can customize the HTML layout and cascading style sheet (CSS), and even add scripting to add behaviors such as mashups to your published lists. For more information, see List Publisher Advanced Design Features.
Access Contact Manager Data from Outside Web Sites
When you add a List Publisher module to display Contact Manager data on your Web site, an RSS feed of this data is created by default. This RSS feed can be used to read and re-display your Contact Manager data anywhere outside of Office Live Small Business, such as on another Web site, a mobile device, or any other tool that can consume RSS feeds. The data in the RSS feed has been specially tagged to make it easy for you to locate. For more information, see Access Application Data from an Outside Web Site.
Integration with Store Manager beta
If a new Web site customer makes a purchase in Store Manager, that customer is automatically added as a contact in the Business Contacts list.
Each time a customer makes a purchase in Store Manager, a purchase activity is added to their activity log.
For an introduction to Store Manager, see Sell Online.
For more information about Store Manager, see the Store Manager documentation included with your Office Live Small Business account.
Integration with E-Mail Marketing beta
You can create and maintain the recipients list for each E-mail Marketing campaign in Contact Manager. Recipients lists are created using the new Contact Groups feature.
Each time an e-mail is sent to a business contact through an E-mail Marketing campaign, an e-mail marketing activity is added to the recipient’s activity log. If the e-mail fails to reach a business contact for any reason, another e-mail marketing activity is added to the log noting the failure.
For more information about e-mail marketing campaigns, see the E-mail Marketing documentation included with your Office Live Small Business account.
Integration with a Web Site Contact Us Module
Each time a Web site visitor sends a message from a Contact Us module on the public Web site, an alert activity is added to their activity log.
For more information about the Contact Us module, see Introduction to Modules.