Setup installed SQL Server 2012 Express locally. For multi-user access, you had to share the database over a network (which required careful firewall and permissions configuration).
Business Contact Manager for Outlook 2013 was a noble, flawed experiment. It gave millions of small businesses their first taste of a shared contact database and sales pipeline—without leaving their email inbox. Today, it is a relic of the on-premises, desktop-first era. But its DNA lives on: every time you see an Outlook add-in that logs emails to a CRM, you’re seeing a shadow of BCM.
Offers deep customization capabilities for fields, tabs, filters, and custom data entities. This ensures the software flexes around distinct niche workflow metrics.
Imagine a sales representative using BCM:
| Solution | Key Feature | Best For | |----------|-------------|----------| | | Full CRM deeply integrated with Outlook (via add-in) | Businesses already on Microsoft 365 | | Outlook 365 with Microsoft Lists + Power Automate | DIY CRM using shared lists and automation | Teams wanting lightweight, free tracking | | HubSpot CRM | Free, powerful contact/email logging via HubSpot Sales Hub add-in | Startups and SMBs | | eWay-CRM | A direct spiritual successor to BCM, built inside Outlook | Users who want an Outlook-native experience | | Bitrix24 | Free tier with Outlook integration | Teams needing project + CRM together |
If you have an old BCM database ( .bcmx or SQL backup), you can still extract the data:
BCM 2013 aimed to solve the common problem of "information silos" by centralizing several key business functions within Outlook: What is Microsoft Business Contact Manager for Outlook
You could link emails, appointments, tasks, and notes directly to specific business contacts, opportunities, or projects. This provided a complete history of interactions—essential for sales and support.
During the lifecycle of Microsoft Office 2013, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) faced a dilemma: the need for structured sales tracking without the budget or infrastructure for enterprise CRM systems like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics.
Business Contact Manager was a free, downloadable add-on for specific editions of Microsoft Outlook (2010, 2013, and earlier). It was not included in the base Outlook 2013 installation but was available as part of Office 2013 Professional Plus or as a separate download for Outlook 2013 standalone.
You could associate multiple business contacts and opportunities with a single project, making it useful for account-based selling or long-term contract management.
If you are still using Outlook 2013 (which itself is long out of support) and need BCM-like functionality, consider these modern replacements:
For anyone still running Outlook 2013 and BCM: be aware that both are unsupported, unpatched, and vulnerable to security issues. The cloud has won. But for a moment in time, BCM made business owners feel like they had an enterprise sales engine running inside the tool they already used every day: Outlook.