Act 6.0

by Act

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• ASIN: B00006HCEU
• Date first available at Amazon.com: October 2, 2001
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,309 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)

Product Description

Amazon.com Review

Imagine Outlook on steroids and you're halfway to understanding what you can do with ACT! 6.0. Installation can take a little planning, as you can't start using ACT! until you have registered it via the Internet or by printing out your registration details. If your PC has neither a printer nor an Internet connection, beware. It is also essential to look through the Readme file before you start using ACT! to ensure you understand how it integrates with other applications. On the plus side, it does include a printed manual so you can find out what it does without having to wade through the online help.

Once installed, you can either start entering your data manually or use the import wizard to import data from an existing source. ACT! allows you to store a vast array of information about your contacts. You can even attach letters and documents that relate to a given contact. Key to ACT! are the sales and opportunities features that allow you to keep track of where you are with each contact. ACT! can either be used as a standalone tool, or a work group can share a single database, with individual usernames and passwords.

Where ACT! really excels is in its ability to integrate with existing applications. From within ACT! you can send e-mails using the software's own e-mail function, or using Outlook or Outlook Express. You can also send faxes with WinFax Pro. Documents can be created using ACT! or your usual word processing program. With suitable hardware you can even have your phone dial your contacts directly with a single mouse click.

Finally, ACT! includes a tool that allows you to synchronize data between different databases. This lets laptop users update their local records and then have the changes copied to the office master file.

ACT! is just the thing for any individual or business that has sophisticated contact and task tracking needs. The integration with your existing applications, plus the sales-orientated features, make for a powerful combination. --Iain Laskey, Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.com Product Description

ACT! 6.0 organizes all your customer information in one place to give you instant access to every detail of every customer relationship. You'll be able to find anyone or any detail in seconds, including names, phone numbers, addresses, notes from previous conversations, upcoming appointment details, call histories, a list of follow-up activities, and much more.

ACT! even manages your sales pipeline with forecasting tools and built-in reports, and allows you to safely share complete customer information with your workgroup. It even works with Outlook, handhelds, and paper planners to propel your business to a whole new level.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Nothing but trouble., March 7, 2003

By 

Joshua Johnston (Nevada, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Act 6.0 (CD-ROM)

Our company had been using ACT since version 2.1, and we still have the big red box with those floppies in it. And after three months of working with ACT 6.0 and the two patches released since launch, we've started to wonder if dusting off those old 80286 machines which once ran ACT 2.1 might be a safer idea. To summarize our experience: It almost killed us.

Late last year, I came to this company as a consultant in information technology and saw a complete disaster built around ACT 5.0 on a peer to peer network. One workstation fed data to three others, and a fourth operated through email synchronizations out in the field. After putting a dedicated and capable server (Dual P3-600, 1G RAM, 18G RAID array) together as a host for the ACT data files and synchronization software, we thought we had it licked. Unfortunately, we should have stopped there. E-mail based synchronization was flaky due to a slightly unreliable ISP.

We then identified an interest in managing QuickBooks Pro and ACT together, which was offered by ACT 6.0. So, when a phonecall came from Interact offering us full version licenses at the upgrade price, we jumped on it, hoping for improvements in the synchronization process and the ability to extend ACT's functionality to other software and devices, such as a considered deployment of Palm OS devices to our sales force. Once we got ACT 6.0 at the office, we were updated and running with it within a week.

Then the trouble started. Synchronization fell even further into a pit, with lost contacts, appointments that refused to reschedule across synchronization, and a complete breakdown of the email software built into ACT. They had seperated the Internet e-mail tool from the main program in a way that seemed to make no sense, spawning a new window while still interrupting the main thread of the ACT database. If your email client hung for some reason, the entire application would stall and require a process kill. And if your email program has a problem finding the hostname to one of your mail servers, forget it. It'll hang.

Accessing the database across our LAN became intolerably slow under ACT 6. Our database, with 4500 contacts, would take a half second to a second or more simply to page through the contacts. Under ACT 5, this is practically instantaneous. Loading the calendar view with only 5 users scheduled, and filtered to only display two, took between 15 and 30 seconds. Under ACT 5, one to two seconds, tops.

We have one of the ACT Advantage support memberships, and even had an ACT certified professional who seemed very knowledgeable look at our setup. He went over every inch of our network and ACT configuration, and saw nothing wrong with anything I had done. The ACT Advantage people told me to install Outlook on the server on the off chance that might work. Why should I need to use a third-party application to make ACT work? If the built-in Internet E-mail option for synchronization is unreliable, why include it for something as important as this?

The "Library" tab was an absolute joke. We could not resize images displayed in it that had been scanned using our sheetfed desktop scanners, and viewing a contact with this tab took up to a minute. It simply boggled the mind how much this "feature" wasn't.

Our largest initial annoyance was the fact our scanners could no longer scan directly into the ACT application. Under ACT 5.0, the scanner functioned simply. View the contact you wanted to attach a document to, feed the document through the scanner, and done. Attached as a note to the contact. Under ACT 6 this broke, and ACT claimed it was a third-party application that they did not support. We had only a very basic program, PaperPort, that managed this interface. It seems to simply use the drag-and-drop functionality inherent to Windows to perform this task. Under ACT 6, this was broken, but of course can be worked around by spending two hundred dollars on an "Add-In"...

In general, ACT 6 felt like a very shoddy product. It felt for all intents and purposes like someone had taken the ACT 5 codebase and decided to split it up into smaller components in order to facilitate the selling of even more Interact and third-party applications and "Add-ins" to increase revenue.

We returned it. It really is not worth the risk.

39 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars New Features Helpful but Very Unstable, November 19, 2002

By 

jelarv "jelv" (Riverside, CT USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Act 6.0 (CD-ROM)

I'm a big ACT! fan as I've been using it for almost 10 years. I haven't come across anything that is as powerful for the price. I was initially excited to see some of the advertized features in version 6.0 because they speed up my work flow. But unfortunately, when I use the look-up and sorting features ACT crashes at least every other try. I'm using Windows NT and there are 4 other users sharing the database (and 1K contacts) but this is considered an acceptable operating environment for this program (and it's the same configuration as I had using 5.0). The feature allowing attachment of documents to a record is also useful but it has bugs, often locking up my computer or pausing for 1-2 minutes to open a simple Word document. If you're not in a rush, wait until version 6.1 or later is released in hopes that the bugs get worked out.

32 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Switched to ACT! 6.0, September 16, 2002

By 

"jjoohhnnkk" (PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Act 6.0 (CD-ROM)

I have been a Goldmine user for the last four years, but after downloading the free trial version of ACT! 6.0 from their web site, I decided to switch. ACT! 6.0 has a much nicer graphical interface and more enriched features than previous releases. ACT! 6.0 integrated nicely with my outlook XP so that I am able to compose and read messages that are sent with Outlook from within the ACT! console. This is a nice feature because email retrieved by ACT! this way can be scanned by my anti-virus software. The library tab is a nice added feature and it allows you to associate several media type files with your contact.

Data conversion for me was quick. I found it fairly easy to set up custom field and reports within ACT. I would recomend this product strongly to anyone who is in the market for contact software. If you are already an Outlook user, this product is particular nice because of its integration with that program.