How to use Outlook Contacts or efficiently create copies in Wrike

Hi Nat, thanks for your post. So I can better understand your feedback, can you let me know where you would like to save these Outlook contacts within Wrike? Thanks!

*Where* is less a concern as *how*. Using Customer Relationship Management as a general use case, from an organizational standpoint, I would tend to associate ("store") a person either (a) with the company/institution for which they work, or (b) in a folder of people/contacts.

Given the inherent nature that project management requires people, I'm curious whether Wrike has a "person" object in the database, which is NOT a Wrike user(!) AND which could be populated with the necessary information vital for managing a person. Such an object could be made suitable to map and import key fields from a contact database.

Nat, I couldn't agree more. When I inquired about this, the answer I got was "Wrike is not a CRM program, its only designed as a project management tool"

My reply to that is, projects are more often than not done for customers, so it only makes sense to have the ability to add customer contact information somewhere, and as ou said, the "where" doesn't mater to me as long as I can add the information for my clients and link them to the projects. I fear Wrike will never implement this into the software from the answer they gave me which I shared in the first paragraph.

Nat, I do have a work around that works well for me. Following these steps will bring all of your outlook contact information, in a table form into a Wrike task that you can then move to a CRM Contact folder.

1. In outlook, right mouse click on your contact card that you want to send to Wrike.
2. In the drop down, click on OneNote. (This only works if you use OneNote)
3. Once you click on OneNote it will bring up your OneNote, notebook selection window. Select which notebook you want it. (This is a temporary location so don't worry about where it goes)
4. Once you select the notebook, it will open one note and there will be your contact card information in a nice orderly table.(Shown in second image.
5. Last, click on the table in OneNote and simply right click, then copy.
6. Then in Wrike, open the task and paste it in the description. Fill out the contact name in the name of the task and move it to your CRM contact folder. It even brings over a link to the outlook contact card. When you click on it, it should open up the contact card in outlook.

I'm strongly considering recommending Wrike for my company however the issue of associating contacts to a project is vital. This workaround doesn't really solve that becuase it silos the data which would be counter productive in the long term. Perhaps there's an outlook integration that could solve this.

Hi all, thanks for your input and feedback. Having people's information in Wrike is always an interesting idea to discuss. Currently, our Product Team is focused on work and project management structures within Wrike while this functionality would fall under a CRM system approach. Our Outlook Integration is focused on the transfer of task and work management information too rather than contacts.

The Product Team is currently looking at adding the ability to assign tasks by role so when it's unknown which individual(s) should be assigned to action the task. I'll be sure to keep you updated when I have more information about this too. I think this is something that would be useful in terms of adding information to tasks without having actual users involved.

As a manual workaround, I've seen teams in the past create a 'Client' Folder, then add the client names as SubFolders with the general information about the client. When they then create a task for an existing client, they can tag the client's Folder by dragging it to the task and it's then a reference.

You're not alone with this idea we do have an open request in our Product Feedback section that would benefit from your votes. Here, Dustin would like to see a person as a workable object within Wrike. If this is something you think would help, please add your vote to the original post.

Happy posting 🙌

Thanks for the reply, Stephen. I voted up the Product Feedback entry you listed. 

Related to Lawrence Kiefer's note above, not all projects are internal; projects are also done for (and with!) customers. For now, (some of) my customers are "completed tasks" which are related to the customer/institution folder. The lack of integration with Outlook Contacts will continue to cause added work.

Thanks for voting there Nat, and I can totally see how this would be a huge help to the way you're working with Clients. For now, there are no immediate plans to develop this within Wrike, especially ahead of some essential work management focused enhancements that are currently on the roadmap. If this changes I'll update the feedback posted I suggested and I'll pop back here too to let you know.

Thanks for adding your valuable insight here for our Product Team's review 👍

Hi Nat, Stephen, I wanted to check if any solution to this use case has been developed. It would be really helpful to tag a contact in a task. Thank you,

Simone

Thank you for supporting this suggestion Simone di Castri! I do not have an update for it at the moment, but I will pass your feedback to the Product team.

Welcome to the Community, by the way! If you'd like to know what this Community has to offer, please check out our New to Community forum 🙂

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover