16, Jan, 2025
9 Views
Comments Off on ACT! 7
0 0

ACT! 7

Written by

Good contact management software can make or break a sales team.
ACT! has been a mainstay of many businesses for years, and the biggest change in version 7 is that MSDE (the desktop edition of SQL Server) is used to manage the database for up to nine users. The Workgroup version uses SQL Server proper.
The switch to MSDE makes the app more robust and scalable, but substantially increases ACTI’s footprint. It seemed sluggish on an Athlon XP2000+, which is significantly faster than the minimum recommendation of a Pentium 3.
ACT! stores a range of data about contacts and interactions with them, including secondary contacts, opportunities, history and notes. The search and sort functions work well and a wide variety of custom fields can be created. A program or activity sequence can be triggered whenever a user enters, leaves or changes a field.
The new export to Excel feature works well, as does the integration with Outlook’s email and calendar functions. ACTI’s calendar is now more flexible, presenting daily and work week calendars in day-planner style, while weekly and monthly views provide lists of scheduled activities. Other changes seem to be geared towards a conventional sales department, with an emphasis on processes and pipelines, and might be less relevant to small, service-oriented businesses.
The user interface isn’t outstanding. Operations involving the timer are clumsy and there’s no provision for dialling phone numbers via modem, which should be in
this type of product. But it does offer an envelope after a letter is printed.
ACT! 7 is incompletely localised. The Australian telephone number format is supported and the standard contact form shows postcode rather than ZIP code, but the Display Map feature doesn’t work with Australian addresses — it wouldn’t have been hard to use Wherels in place of MapQuest.
Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer reports that MSDE SP3 was installed, but not the latest hotfix. You can’t install hotfixes without a password, which ACT! Asia Pacific won’t disclose to ensure you don’t mess up the database. This is a massive concern: remember the Slammer worm?
For contact management, Maximizer 8 (see APC September 2004, page 52) is a better option.

Article Tags:
Article Categories:
Software

Comments are closed.