Hierarchical, non-Relational Database

The primary disadvantage of Outlook as a database is that it is a hierarchical rather than a relational database. Most users tend to use their Outlook folders as discrete elements, i.e. because it is fairly cumbersome for users to link one item to another, (e.g. a contact to an appointment) they seldom do this. Thus it is difficult for users in a company to get an overall picture of all the activity occurring within the organisation against any particular company or contact. The universal objective of any CRM system however, is to provide a “single-view of all customer-related information to everyone in the organisation". As will be seen later, this limitation can be overcome automatically by synchronizing your Outlook Contact and E-Mail data to a relational database like SQL Server.

Inferior Indexing

While Exchange Public Folders seem to handle large volumes of items within a folder, Exchange Server is not geared to indexing these items efficiently (when compared to SQL Server). So for example the speed with which one can find all the items in one folder that are related to an item in another folder via a key field dramatically slows down when there are say more than 25,000 items in the folder being searched.

Unfamiliar Data Structure

Outlook/Exchange folders are an unfamiliar data structure for more databases, report writers, etc. Even Microsoft’s own low-end database product Access has difficulty linking to an Outlook or Exchange folder in such a way that all fields (including custom fields) can be viewed/manipulated.