OK Lon!
I keep jumping from using ACT! to OBCM in frustration.
ACT! is driven by me, so when I want to make an appointment with A Client I go to that client's record and make the appointment and up it pops in my diary saying A Client - Meet to talk Biz.  Brilliant.  Ditto with tasks and Phone calls A Clients - Prepare Trust Deed or A Client - call for decision - easy peezy!
Outlook/BCM is driven by Microsoft's assumption that everyone in business this side of the Orion Nebula is a huge corporate machine, so when I want to make an appointiment with A Client I go to their record and it asks me for Subject and Location.  So I type Meet to talk Biz and His London office. This then pops up in my diary as subject and location with no mention whatsoever about who with........
Surely all you clever software wizards by now could have sorted out some way of automatically inserting the client's name at the front of this subject box as an option to chose in Settings somewhere, so us mere one man band mortals and all the ex-ACT! users in the universe (well this side of the Orion Nebula anyway) know who we are going to do whatever with or for....?  Or give us an auto key combination that when executed will pop the client's Full Name field in where the curser is resting....?  Ditto in Task and everywhere else where one needs to be able to ID who the dikcens we are supposed to be doing whatever with or for
Arghhhhhhhhhhh!
Or did my geriatric brain miss something here......?
Yours in sheer exasperation - otherwise known as "He of the Three concurrect Databases" (Outlook Contacts, BCM, ACT!)

Ashcan:

 

Well, I can feel your pain!  It's not easy out there...  Yes, Microsoft should have done this but hasn't.  I think (this is not necessarily the "real reason", just Lon's theory) that since Outlook started as an email program and has evolved into a Personal Information Manager (PIM), it was not planned for or architected to link these together like ACT did from the 1.0 start.  You've got an integrated contact manager versus an email program, with an added address book, task list, and calendar. 

That's where BCM enters the mix -- an AddOn to allow people to link these together.  The problem for BCM is that it's not really Outlook, it's an AddOn.  So, the BCM Team is as foreign to the Outlook Team as you and I are and the one thing I've learned in my dealings with Microsoft is that you don't mess with Outlook.  With 600MILLION people depending on it for email, it's a big part of Microsoft's platform.

I don't have a great answer for you but I do have a few possible ones.  I'll list them in order of ease, but not keystrokes:

1.  Just bite the bullet and add the person's name in the Subject -- that's what I've resigned myself to.  I enter a Subject like "Lunch with Ashcan Nebula" or "Prepare trust deed for Ashcan Nebula".  It's more keystrokes but solves the problem.

2.  Get rid of Outlook Contacts, just use BCM's, and link tasks and appointments to the BCM contact.  I like to right click on the contact and schedule a new task from there -- that links it immediately.  That also gets it into History.  However, since it's an AddOn, the linkage isn't perfect.  But, it works pretty well for most users.

3.  There is some VBA code (Visual Basic for Applications) that was posted on the BCM Newsgroup called BCM Nexus (written by Bill Kratz).  It was designed to create two pseudo fields that could be put in a view and show the contact and the contact's phone number from BCM that is linked to the task or appointment.  This would solve your problem but you may need some help getting it setup correctly.  Anyone that knows VBA scripting in Office could help you.

So, there's the good, the bad, and the ugly...

Hope that helps,
Lon

Oh a thousand thanks Oh Venerable and Knowledgable One :)

I'll look at Uncle Bill's Newsgroup and spend an evening teaching myself VBA.

Regards from Blighty