i had previously used the beta version with no problems, now that i have a licensed copy of office 2010 the business contact manager in outlook won't work. i get the following error every time i try to sync my contacts

"Business contact manager for Outlook could not complete your last action or actions. Please try again"

the sample database doesn't work at all, the start screens for welcome center, contact management, sales, etc don't load either, although the buttons & tabs in the ribbon do. the buttons for creating a new business account, new project, etc don't work. they click and do nothing.

i've read a shit ton of forum posts & none of their solutions are working so far. i've deleted a registry key that fixed most people's problems, but not mine. i uninstalled all beta components. i've uninstalled/reinstalled the office suite twice, the 2nd time deleting the office, outlook, & bcm folders in the appdata folder. i checked to make sure it's not in the disabled add-ins list. i've run ccleaner, which found a bunch of errors, but bcm still doesn't work. email, calendar, contacts all work fine.

i NEED this thing to work. please please help

[Edited on October 14, 2010 at 11:06 AM. Reason : ]

10/14/2010 11:05:27 AM

okay somehow the buttons work now, but i cannot get it to sync contacts from anywhere! i have a copy of all our contacts on my local machine & we have contacts on the server too. i've gone to file > bcm > business contact sync > sync local contacts. it says it's synced but there are no contacts in the folder. i've tried copy/paste a million times too.




MOTHERFUCKER! i just spend all this time changing the project info form to fit our needs, entered a bunch of info for a project, and it's GONE

wehf9ufauhfweoiufhawpowfhufhweff7032rhah grrrrr this is why i hate ms. why release a product that doesn't work & not provide the tiniest bit of support? it's $300 for tech support. wtf

[Edited on October 14, 2010 at 11:51 AM. Reason : ]

10/14/2010 11:47:56 AM

No it's not.

If you buy a retail copy of office it comes with support. Have you been to the ms office community site?

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/default.aspx

10/14/2010 1:09:49 PM

every time i go to the support page it tells me i have to pay. please help me find the free version that's not a forum.

i've searched through the community forums & all of the answers involve things i've already tried, or say to download a service pack for 2007 or 2003 (i have 2010).

10/14/2010 1:39:05 PM

our kind of IT guy looked into sql server problems related to bcm, and found an article that told me to open cmd, enter

sqlcmd -E -d master

which gave me this error message

hresult 0x2, level 16, state 1
named pipes provider: could not open a connection to sql server [2].
sqlcmd: error: microsoft sql server native client 10.0: a network-related or instance-specific error has occurred while establishing a connection to sql server. server is not found or not accessible. check if instance name is correct and if sql server is configured to allow remote connections. for more information see sql server books online..
sqlcmd: error: microsoft sql server native client 10.0: login timout expired.

i have NO clue what all this means. is the sql server something that can be uninstalled & reinstalled? would that do any good?

10/14/2010 2:33:43 PM

k, problem solved. i formatted, reinstalled everything, it works.

10/14/2010 5:06:33 PM

Quote :

"please help me find the free version that's not a forum."

Why don't you use the forums???

Product teams WATCH the forums to answer questions and resolve problems for customers. This is the quickest and best way to get your problem investigated and answered by someone who actually works on the product.

I know the product I work on (TFS) spends on average 2 hours per week PER person answering support and guidance questions on our product forum.


Microsoft support isn't like your typical company. We don't have the "level 1" call centers you have been trained to expect. With MS, you either get your questions answered indirectly through product forums by the product team or partners themselves, or you get immediately escalated to a realtime immediate solution.

The support you are talking about (I'm guessing) is CSS support. Yes this costs money, because it is REALTIME mission critical product support. You get engineers personally assigned to figuring out and solving your problem immediately. This is incredibly expensive for the company, hence why it costs money. I can tell you Microsoft doesn't make any money on this. It's to cover a tiny fraction of the cost of the service.

Most of the time CSS support is used for mission critical enterprise requests that need specific engineering fixes (aka the customer needs something that a product can't actually do) and results in customer specific patches/code/hotfixes.

10/14/2010 5:07:41 PM

BTW the error you posted above usually means that somehow SQL Server doesn't have Named Pipes enabled as a connection type.

SQL server can use TCP and/or Named Pipes. Sounds like in the beta->rtm move that somehow got horked.

Glad you got it working, next time don't be afraid to use the forums!

10/14/2010 5:09:10 PM

the forums are pretty decent, especially for free. i just checked my post history and in the dozen or so times i've posted there, i've gotten an answer to every one, even if it was just "this is not supported for X reason" and most of the time in < 3 days.

10/14/2010 5:17:19 PM

i wanted real support because it's real time. i had shit to get done and didn't have time to wait 3 days for someone to maybe reply. i've posted to the forums before for other problems and it's just too slow, if it gets answered at all.

i fixed it before the end of the work day

10/14/2010 9:31:38 PM