- Platform: Windows 2000 / XP / 2000 Server / 2003 Server
- Media: CD-ROM
- Item Quantity: 1
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Product Description
Amazon.com Product Description
ACT!, from Sage, has been known as the software program for contact and customer information management. The new ACT! 2006 builds on its past successes of providing a central customer database to track contact details, notes, history, appointments, to-do lists, documents, and new opportunities, and adds more features and better integration with Microsoft Office, Lotus notes, and handheld devices.
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| Manage customer interactions at the company level with the Company Record feature. |
With all your contact information in one place you can more easily track key customer data. Each customer record includes over 60 pre-defined fields, including Name, Company, Phone, Address, Website, Email, Last Meeting Date, ID/Status, and other customizable fields depending on your specific needs. When you create company records you can view a compiled history with notes and opportunities related to each contact at that company. The Groups feature lets you communicate and schedule with related contacts. The notes and other entries you create can be customized using Rich Text Formatting (FTF) so you can add color, links, bullets, graphics, and more. You can also customize layouts by changing colors, adding logos and moving fields so that each record displays the most important information to you in a way that's clear to you.
One of ACT!'s greatest strengths is its ability to help you stay in touch with growing business relationships. With it you can track customer correspondences and view a history of all communications with that company or organization.
Act! also supplies pre-formatted templates for emails, letters, memos and faxes so that you don't need to fuss with the details or start from scratch each time. Perform a mail merge by selecting a group of contacts to send one email or letter, and a history of the correspondence is then automatically generated for each contact. If you choose, you can use the ACT! E-mail Client to create, send and track e-mail, or use your existing client, as ACT! has seamless integration with Outlook, Outlook Express and Lotus Notes.
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| Prioritize your day to stay on top of appointments and tasks. |
ACT! helps you prioritize work so that you never lose out on opportunities or forget to follow up with a contact. With ACT! you can easily schedule calls, meetings, and to-dos, or filter these actions by priority, date range, or user. The calendar can be viewed by day, week or month, giving you specific actions for each day or a broader view to plan out an entire month. If you mouse over any activity in the calendar, you'll see a pop-up window with an "at-a-glance" view. Additionally, Activity Alarms will help you stay on top of action items, and incomplete activities will roll over to the next day until they are checked off. ACT! and Outlook calendars can even be synchronized so that you can still schedule appointments with those who don't use ACT!.
ACT! doesn't just let you plan for today: you can also use it to forecast for tomorrow. The built-in Sales Process helps you track sales opportunities, and you can view all opportunities at once or filter by specified criteria.
The Product List lets you track products or service names, along with item number, cost, and price, and you can generate quotes for sales opportunities without having to re-enter information. There are over 20 pre-formatted Sales Reports, or you can export reports to Microsoft Excel for further data analysis.
Those on the go will appreciate the ability to synchronize the ACT! calendar, contact list, to-do information, notes, and history items with Palm OS or Pocket PC devices. Or if you prefer paper organizers you can print to more than 20 of the most popular organizer formats. When out of the office, you can access critical information via Citrix or Terminal Services.
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| Enhance your database for more accurate reporting. |
Product Description
ACT! by Sage 2006 is the #1 best-selling contact and customer manager that helps you make contact, build relationships, and get results. ACT! enables you to instantly access key contact and customer information, manage and prioritize activities, and track all contact-related communications so you can grow productive business relationships. With ACT!, you can generate reports for a complete view of customer interactions and improve your bottom line by forecasting and tracking customer opportunities. Renowned for its ease of use, ACT! can be tailored by each user and integrates with the tools you use everyday, such as Microsoft Office, Lotus Notes, and handheld devices.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
106 of 113 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
ZERO STARS - Soooo slow and crash-prone. DON"T BUY!!!,
This review is from: ACT! 2006 (CD-ROM)
I started using ACT! back with ACT! 2000 (version 5) for our 5 member workgroup. That version was fraught with problems. Just getting it to run required monumental effort, with various Windows tweaks and Registry settings having to be modified. Once all that was accomplished the software ran, not well, but sufficiently well to serve our needs. It doesn't integrate well with Outlook or Word, which causes it to crash now and then, but mostly it works.
When version 6 came out, the marketing stated that it was more stable, faster, and better integrated with Office. I immediately purchased it, installed it, and ran it. Within seconds my system locked up and displayed the Blue Screen of Death. I rebooted, uninstalled, and called for a refund. I had visions of more weekends spent trying to get ACT! to play nice. I skipped version 7. Then I received the Sage marketing pack for ACT! 2006, and read the very glowing claims that it put forth: Streamlined Productivity! Simpler Scheduling! Better Administration and Security! Time Savings! Guaranteed! Hah! Here's the reality: yes, there are new features in ACT! 2006, like company records, a new group heirarchy, security enhancements, and scrolling mouse support. Unfortunately none of those features can be used because the program is so painfully slow. It hijacks system resources like mad but appears to use none of the memory or processor capabilities; it just hoards them away from other programs. Open a menu and close it, and a ghost of the menu remains. Move a field in Template Designer, and it leaves ghost images along the entire path. The only way to be rid of these is to minimize/restore, minimize/restore, over and over until you want to scream. For those who will scoff, I'm not using some ancient box from Tandy. I have a Dell Dimension 8200 with a P4 1.8GHz, 1GB RAM, ATI Radeon 256MB graphics card. I work daily with Paint Shop Pro and SolidEdge, and the PC never hiccups. I typically have Word, Excel, Outlook, ACT! 2000, Navision, and SolidEdge open at all times, plus the numerous background programs everybody needs like ZoneAlarm, AdAware, Norton AV, yada yada. Sage support tells me the computer is at fault. That's what they told me with version 6. That's what they'll tell you when you call them. Trust me - Big Blue couldn't make this program run faster. The sad part is that there is really no other product for individuals or small businesses that can compete with ACT!. So I'm staying with ACT! 2000 and returning my copy of ACT! 2006. Maybe they'll get it right in version 9...
65 of 70 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Company is going, going... gone!,
This review is from: ACT! 2006 (CD-ROM)
I bought Act several years ago and was induced to upgrading with their special offer. Boy did that turn into an amazing time waster.
I downloaded the demo and it seemed to be OK although it was slow. I had a crash or two but figured I'd make the investment to learn it and decided to upgrade. I was never sent a serial number after purchase because their automated system failed. Two emails didn't help. Neither did a call where I was told that an email would be dispensed to their operations department alerting them this problem existed so I could be sent my serial number. Amazing. More amazing was no serial number. I sent 3 more emails. No serial number. Finally I bombarded sales and support and was sent a serial number after I told them I was interested in my money back. I'm going to send a reply to get my money back. Can you imagine what support is like if sales is so inadequate? Isn't this supposed to manage their own processes? Pathetic. Don't waste your time and believe the other reiviews.
27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Using ACT since v3 - What a disappointment we have here!,
This review is from: ACT! 2006 (CD-ROM)
I've been an ACT! cheerleader since v3. Last year I purchased ACT 2005 and could not believe they actually released a product that performed so poorly. Returned it for a refund.
** Fast forward to about 2 weeks ago ** I received a promotional offer for 2006 talking about all the performance improvements, etc. I called and spoke directly to a Rep to relate my tale of woe w/2005, and to be assured that I wasn't going to be wasting my time again. The expected response: As far as performance issues of 2005, "this was a totally different product" and "we know that version had problems and all of those have been resolved..." (ok he's a sales guy - what's he supposed to say: "Yeah, this version bites too"??) Well, I bit...and bought...and hoped...and couldn't believe it - same old dog as 2005. Startup takes forever, screen writes take forever, lookups take forever (anyone sensing a pattern here)? I REALLY wanted this to be a fixable problem since as mentioned previously, I'm a huge ACT! fan. Tech support could ONLY say that "this is a really big program" and suggest some tweaks for improving the performance of my system (not the performance of ACT!). All this despite the fact that other "really HUGE programs" I use (including Siebel 7 and Oracle) manage to perform acceptably. My system way exceeds ACT's minimum requirements (P4 1.8GHz, 512MB RAM, 30GB HD) - unfortunately the 2006 product is just a pig. I have less than 5,000 contacts but when using the ACT! 2006 address book from within Outlook, it takes more than 90 seconds just to bring up the contacts so I can select an email address. ** That's a minute and a half of my life that I'll never get back! ** :-) This was not just on the initial attempt (which in itself is unacceptable), but even pulling up the addresses again *within the same email* takes....you guessed it - another 90+ seconds! I tried my best to use it for a solid week, did all the recommended tweaks, etc - but it's simply intolerable. Looks like my v6 will be around for awhile longer.
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