It's the second and third sections of the book that make this a standout offering. In the second section, Lon writes about how to move your thinking from ACT! to BCM. Now, if you've ever used a CRM product like ACT!, you know you need to develop a philosophy of managing your contacts. When you switch CRM programs, that approach, that philosophy needs to change. In this book, Lon explains how your approach to managing your contacts will need to change, how the terminology changes between the programs, what you're going to miss, and some neat tricks you'll gain when you make the move. It's a great section and I wish more books would think about the thinking as well as the data.

Finally, Lon understands that sales and contact management require daily rituals. In Moving from ACT! to Microsoft's Business Contact Manager, Lon's final section is about moving your "daily doing" from ACT! to BCM. This is another wildly helpful section and it'll help you develop the good calling and management habits that'll help make you more successful.

Remember back when you were in school and you had these tough teachers that wanted you to live up your your potential? Those annoying educators who claimed that since you could do more, you should do more? Well, we're now doing that to Lon. We think that since he's done such a fabulous job of teaching us how to move to BCM, now we want him to teach us, with his wonderfully seasoned perspective, how to work in BCM on a full-time basis. We've moved in, we've hung some pictures. Now, Lon, teach us how to take it to the next level.

Overall, this book accomplishes exactly what it claims. It'll teach you, with great support, how to move from ACT! to BCM. It's good, but we really want more. We'd really like to see something ten times more comprehensive, taking Lon's exceptional approach and applying it to BCM as a whole. We'd love to see sections detailing all of the approaches to selling and managing contacts, from scheduling and follow-ups to working in a team, to managing lead flow and so forth. To be fair, Lon never claims his book does that, so we give Moving from ACT! to Microsoft's Business Contact Manager a fast moving 4 out of 5.

If you're an ACT! user and you want to move to BCM, this is the best $27 you'll spend. Buy it. Lon, we're waiting for your next book. Go write, now!

OUR RATING: 4 of 5

Diane Poremsky is the president of CDOLive LLC and a Microsoft Outlook MVP. She's author of Teach Yourself Outlook 2003 in 24 Hours (Sam's, 2003) and coauthor of OneNote 2003 for Windows (Visual QuickStart Guide). For questions or suggestions for future columns, write her at outlook@cdolive.com.