When Office 2010 launched, Microsoft made the questionable decision to only include Business Contact Manager (BCM) with the Volume License suites of Office 2010 (Standard and Professional Plus). This decision left out all the people who are using BCM in a standalone environment or in an environment which needs less than 5 Office 2010 licenses.
Microsoft has reconsidered this decision and has now made BCM 2010 available as a free add-in. There is a catch though; you must already have a license of a qualifying previous version (2003 or 2007) to be entitled to get BCM for Outlook 2010.
This means that if you want to get started with BCM 2010 but do not own a previous license for it, you’ll still need to obtain a Volume License version of the Office 2010 suite to be able to use it legally. However, the BCM download site accepts any key of an Office 2010 suite that includes Outlook and no check is made for a previous version.
So, considering the above fact that there is no technical limitation of using BCM 2010 with any version of Outlook 2010, let’s hope that Microsoft will reconsider again and adjust the License Terms to make BCM 2010 a truly free add-in for all Outlook 2010 versions!
