Customer Reviews

ACT! 2000

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Outlook is good and powerful and all that, but ACT 2000 can still do more. It has the ability to truly manage your business and help you identify trends among prospects and existing clients.

But don't judge it by how you feel about the program after the first three months only. If you want to use this software to its fullest, you need peace and quiet and uninterrupted time to set it up. The customizable fields make this yours, and that can slow you down on set-up.

The last company I worked for, we spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get the form of the database perfected before we started data entry. In retrospect, that is NOT the way to use ACT 2000. With my own company, we started by entering basic information about all (then) 275 prospects. We've only started with the customization now that we have a better feel for who we are and what we need.

If the people who will be using this contact management database are computer novices, you will need to send them to an all-day course. A database with its mail merges and all is not a word processor. Those employees will need someone who can communicate succinctly what the purpose of the software is.

But a good intermediate computer person should be able to figure ACT 2000 out on their own. It's largely intuitive, especially once it's already set up.

My gripes? As one of the first good contact management softwares out there (I loved the old DOS version), they could be light years ahead of Outlook. Instead, they are just slightly better.

And their support is not helpful at all, online or in person.

And, perhaps ONE day I will learn to love their funnel...

This software is by far the best contact-management software. I especially recommend it for independent sales people, such as real estate agents. Every letter you write, every phone call you make can be logged into a contact record. You can send your emails directly from your contact list (and boy does that save time.) You can interface your Palm V with ACT too, meaning you can have your customer contacts on the road, and update the information when back in your office. And it's not hard to use to set up and use ACT at all. Very user friendly.

While Microsoft Outlook is powerful and useful for doing in-office correspondence and task management, it is not as suitable as ACT for contact management. Contact management is a specific job, and ACT does it best.

I have used Act since the DOS days and love it. It has always been an important part of our business. I normally don't write reviews (who has the time) but I felt passionate about this particular problem. We have a 4-person office and network ACT so that we all use the same database. This has never been a problem until Act 2000. InterAct Corp has decided to exercise their muscles and put an electronic serial number into each copy of Act 2000. Normally this would be no big deal but now each user MUST have an individual copy to use the database. And there is no break on the price until 10 users!! That means it will cost you [the price of an individual copy] x the number of people in your office. Get ready to write a big check (or I would seriously consider another aplication...Gold Mine, Access, there are a lot of great ones to choose from). I know that the need to have individual copies of this software is the law and we are always supposed to do this but you would think for the cost you could do a little more with it. Also it would have been good to know this before converting to Act 2000. But they would never do that. We all remember when Microsoft tried this but decided against it when they lost market share. You would think Interact would learn.... maybe in Act 2001 but that will cost [more money]!!

Good luck to all.

Scott

At first when I was using ACT 2000 I was unsure of the quality of it and how well it would handle my work load. After a few months I was put to shame as became aparent that this indeed was the saving grace that my company was looking for. With its easy to use interface and group interactive qualities it easily became the most used product at my company. Definitely a thumbs up from this guy.

ACT does not support using your palm to synch between two computers. I work at home half the time and at the office half the time, and have always used one palm to synch to both machines. If you do this with ACT, you end up with 4 different copies of each record. You can synch database to database at two different locations, but it entails using a zip drive (floppy is too small) to carry the updates from computer to computer. Not very convenient.

Theoretically a great product, but I can't really use it.

What a breath of fresh air! Puts Outlook to shame and is really a "must-have" for any account salesperson. Manages your relationships at every step throughout the sales process. Maintains a running history of all calls, e-mails, and letters to and from a contact (which you can pull up at a moment's notice to quote to a prospect if they "remember" things differently than you do). Also allows you to group contacts and companies with common denominators for easy marketing. ACT! is not the only software that can do this effectively, but for me the final choice was between ACT! and GoldMine. Any PIM will be a little hard to use for a first-timer, but ACT! is notably easier to learn and use than GoldMine. ACT! crashes once in a while and has a few bugs, but I've never used a software product that was always stable. True, GoldMine is a little more powerful in a few areas, such as creating search groups through its Filter feature, but ACT! really has everything you need and doesn't clutter up your brain and your RAM with a bunch of complex features that you rarely use. Also, there is now a piece of software available that links my ACT! contacts to my accounts receivable processes in QuickBooks, and that was probably the clincher. If you have any doubts, download both ACT! and GM trial versions and try them both at once for free--that's what I did and I found myself naturally gravitating toward ACT! from Day One of the trial period.

ACT 5.0 works very well and is reasonably easy to use. However, there is one killing flaw. IT WON'T WORK WITH OUTLOOK EXPRESS 6.0. So, those of us with WINDOWS XP cannot take advantage of what was formerly a seemless interface with Outlook Express 5.0.

I've been using ACT for several years now and love it except for the e-mail interface to Outlook. It's clunky, slow, and does not support HTML so I keep finding myself reverting back to Outlook to send e-mail. This means that I'm not keeping track of e-mail through ACT which is a real problem. Even when I do go to the effort to send e-mail through ACT it doesn't keep a pop-up file like it does for letters. Too bad, this is really a great tool. I just wish it was even better.

Just a response to an earlier review. You can update ACT! 2000 to version 5.0.4 and it works with Windows XP!

I am terribly disappointed in this software. Because it has been sold back and forth among several companies over the last few years, product development has lagged badly. Right now, the product isn't worth using. As one of their support technicians acknowledged to me on the phone, ACT's integration of email with other contact management functionality is practically nonexistent, leaving the program several years behind the realities of relationship management in the 21st century. ACT is so bad in its current state that I uninstalled it and am writing off the cost of the software. Perhaps if I do not find a better solution in the meantime, I may look into the next version whenever it is released. But for right now, NOT RECOMMENDED.