Customer Reviews

ACT! 6.0 Upgrade

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I am one of the MANY victims of this poor excuse for an update. Stick with Act 2000 if you have it. Just go to the ACT web site and check out the discussion forums. Everyone is mad as hell.

If you are planning to upgrade from Act!2000 think about it twice. Not worth a fifth of its price, and not totally debugged either. It messed up my Outlook e-mail, keeps hunging up in Win XP when you try to run reports previously defined in Act!2000 (that run like a jewel in the previous version) and more. Graphic interface is so bad that some of the icons leave you guessing as to what they are. Some of the features I appreciated from the previous version have been taken out. Thankfully it comes with a 30 day money-back guarantee. I got so upset with it that I claimed my refund.

In looking for a good, solid contact management program, I was drawn to ACT!. For personal use, Outlook was fine, but when it came to managing my business clients and contacts (the core of any business), Outlook wasn't sufficient. So I thought I'd take advantage of the powerful features that ACT! pitches.

Bottom line: Save the money. ACT! might be powerful, but it's hidden underneath a clumsy (VERY) interface and poor coupling with Outlook. In addition, its limited feature set proved the ultimate downfall, as I was unable to use ACT! as my e-mail client because their limited settings do not suffice for my advanced e-mail setup.

I suppose for basic contact management, ACT! would work. For someone who wants to spend less time managing their contact management program and more time managing their CONTACTS, I recommend you steer clear of this product.

I upgraded right when it first became available. Yes, there are some minor bugs (as is with all major windows product releases). I do wish they had built in a function to search for and merge duplicate entries, but by and large it is a good upgrade. The e-mail interface is a thousand times better than the old version which makes this upgrade worth it by itself. I also like the new date searchable fields (so you can look up birthdays and items like that). What I don't like is that once you upgrade, everyone else you synchronize with has to upgrade too. That is unecessary and I called the folks at ACT! and told them about this. I am looking forward to the service pack, and when the first service pack is released, addressing the minor bugs, I think this will be a worthwhile upgrade for most ACT! users.

I was stupid enough to be drawn into the hype marketing of the fabulous ACT 6.0 upgrade and had planned to use it to its full capacity. Since putting our 14,000 plus contacts database on the server just 2 months ago, it has completely corrupted twice, lost valuable data, corrupted outlook twice, constantly stops reponding and wasted the equivalent of about 3 weeks work trying to fix the damn thing. We try to use the database to a reasonable capacity only to be stopped at every turn. I spend more time navigating the service website only to find more and more ridiculous bugs that have not been addressed. The latest recommendation was to exclude Norton anti virus from checking any database files - a dangerous practice to get into. Good luck anyone who has enough patience to persevere with this waste of money, resources and time.

On the page that offers the full version of Act! 6.0 there is a link to a $70 rebate for people who are upgrading. Because the rebate form requires a UPC code to be cut out and sent in, this only applies to the 'CD' version of the upgrade software. However, the rebate form limits the offer to four different UPC code US versions and two different CDN versions of this product. When I received the upgrade package, the product's UPC code didn't match any of the UPC codes on the rebate form. I returned the product.

If you are purchsing the upgrade version, you won't be able to use the $70 rebate.

I'm not an experienced ACT user, but recently have been converting to it. I'd been using ACT 2000, which I purchased a while ago, with Windows XP and Outlook. I was completely frustrated - the Outlook integration for email was awful and ACT was buggy with XP - constant crashes or freezes (and that's not common with XP). Now I'm on the free 30-day trial of 6.0 and it is a vast improvement. Email with Outlook works way better; it's actually usable! So that in itself is worth it to me. I just placed my order for the program. I haven't used enough of the other features to give it 5 stars, but it's worth the upgrade.

I upgraded from ACT 2000 because I needed to be able to send out email mailings to my customers in HTML. ACT 6 does do that pretty well, so I'm pleased I went ahead with the upgrade. But without doubt Interact has introduced a lot of bugs into the product -- I guess they lost most of the programmers who knew the program when they bought ACT from Symantec. The email program itself is buggy and will only work for me if I have Outlook running as well. Also, very frustrating, is that the wordprocessor driver crashes after one use, so I can only create one document at a time then I have to reboot. Their support site doesn't seem to have a solution for this.
Apart from rewriting the email system, there is very little that's upgraded from ACT 2000, as far as I can tell.

I am in excatly the same boat; Since 1993 using ACT! (when it was good for it's time) (sending faxes, letters, etc from the contact), and waited for the new millenium up to date with e mail, but it does not work.
So, If not ACT!, any suggestions for an alternative? I have 14,000 database, and use it to group, send a newsletter via email, and a susbscription (print labels and manage subs) of about 8,000.
Any ideas?
Thanks

I am a Virtual Assistant who works with several clients who use ACT. I keep their databases up to date and synchronize with them whenever necessary. ACT 6.0 is a bit bloated and has unnecessary features but on my machine it has been stable and was easy to set up. This is a good, solid database program that has great customer forums available on their web site.