There are many advantages to using Outlook for managing and maintaining your customer/contact database and tracking interactions with these contacts.

1. Contact Management Functionality
   
   Outlook already has the basic components that make up any contact management system. Trying to reproduce this functionality inside your SQL system may not be a simple task:
   
   
   1. A mechanism to store and profile Contact information: The “Contacts” folder in Outlook already allows a comprehensive profile of any personal or business contact to be maintained.
      
      
   2. A means to plan and organise appointments for those contacts: Outlook’s calendaring facilities provide these very effectively and when coupled with Exchange Server incorporate a huge number of collaborative features that are extremely difficult for any other stand-alone CRM system to emulate or reproduce.
      
      
   3. A means to schedule tasks and to-do’s for those contacts: Outlook’s task management facility is excellent for this.
      
      
   4. A mechanism to record any kind of interaction with a contact: The “Journal” facility of Outlook contains the standard fields necessary to record phone calls, meeting, etc. with clients, and can even time such activities.
      
      
   5. A way to send and track e-mail communication: The Inbox and Sent Items stores inward and outward e-mails.

    

2. Familiarity/Ease of Use
   
   If users are already utilising Outlook for at least e-mail and calendaring then they are already familiar with the interface and how to add new items, edit existing items, etc. Thus there is usually very little requirement for additional training on how to maintain the customer/contact database.
   
   
3. Customisability
   
   Outlook forms can be very easily customised to contain additional data fields that are required. The Outlook Forms Designer is a very powerful tool. For more details on how to use the Outlook Forms Designer, see the following article:
   
   Profiling your Outlook Contacts using the Outlook Forms Designer
   
   
4. Easy Synchronization with PDA's
   
   Given that all PDA’s synchronise with Outlook as a standard, this means that you have automatic access to your Contact Management data if it is kept in Outlook rather than being in another application.