Customer Reviews

ACT! by Sage Premium for Workgroups 2007 Upgrade

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1 star:		(4)

 

 

DO NOT BUY THIS JUNK SOFTWARE! Sorry...there's no way around it. I have to start there. And that's the best part of my review. This is without a doubt, the buggiest "software" (I use that term in quotes since real software, um...let's see...WORKS). The customer service is the absolute worst. They want to charge you money to tech in their awful software. The MYSQL interface burns every living thing in its path. My 9 year old nephew could write better code. Let's recap: Customer Service? Non-existent. Product? Doesn't load. Won't load. Can't load. Randomly stops loading. The only thing this garbage does consistently is slow my machine down to a crawl when working. And I have a custom build Intel Core 1-7 980 Extreme Edition Processor with three solid state drives on a RAID 0. It literally doesn't get faster than that. But when running ACT!, my super-machine feels like a Commodore 64. Please, for the love of God, DO NOT BUY THIS GARBAGE. You will waste more time tech'ing this software, fighting it, re-inputting all your data over-and-over-and-over-and-over again. As a sales tool, I've lost so much money. It literally is THE WORST SOFTWARE EVER CREATED.

What a nightmare this product is. I can't believe Sage released this. If I could give it negative 5 stars I would. DO NOT BUY THIS!! My computer runs slower than it did with 6.0. When we converted the data from 6.0 (on it's own, this is a special brand of hell), it didn't bring over both phone numbers for contacts!!! THIS IS A CONTACT DATABASE! YOU NEED YOUR CONTACT PHONE NUMBERS! Getting the database set up on our server took hours and hours of time on the phone with the tech helpline. Even they had trouble.

In 6.0, you could cut and paste items into the history and notes tab and then edit them. When you paste into the tabs now, it's treated as a picture and can't be edited. 2007 didn't convert over our print templates and we had to build them by hand. NIGHTMARE!

DO NOT, DO NOT, DO NOT BUY THIS!!!

It actually deserves no stars. Our company, an American multinational corporation, bought this product for one of our departments in Brazil and never received valid installation codes in order to make it work. After a 30 day trial and training of all our users, we had to stop all work because the reseller for Latin America didn't offer any help and the developer showed no interest in hearing our complaints. This treatment for a product paid in full 15 days before the expiration of the trial period. Be prepared to face tremendous problems if you need support. Our last opinion is: good product for your home, if you can actually receive it. Not adequate for corporations, judging by their horrendous customer service, the worst I saw in my entire professional life.

My company purchased this software as an upgrade from Act 6.0. That version was buggy, but this one is completely unusable. After four months and countless hours and dollars of trying to get just minimal functionality out of it, we are giving up on this software and replacing it. What a waste!

Workstations run much slower with this software installed (memory upgrades did not help). When we checked into the problem with the vendor, we were told it is a "known issue" and there is no estimated date for a patch. The database itself runs so slowly (on a brand-new laptop with tons of memory) that it's basically impossible to use it for its intended purpose. If I get a call from a client, I can forget looking up the client and taking notes while talking to him. The phone call will be over by the time the lookup is completed. Even for a basic phone number lookup, by the time I get the number I have often forgotten why I needed to call someone.

Don't need lookups to be fast? Never fear, this product has lots of other ways to make you miserable. Doing a mail merge is always a thrill - will it crash my system this time? Synchronizing among multiple copies of a database? Don't expect your templates to synchronize every time. If you don't sync often enough, reminders pop up every 5 minutes; if you don't notice the reminder and hit "OK" soon enough (or synchronize, which takes forever even over a high-speed network), your entire laptop or workstation will grind to a complete halt.

I cringe when I realize I have to open Act! to get something done. I never use it if I have any alternative. I am pretty tolerant of buggy software; nothing's perfect and the older versions of Act! were nothing special. But I am truly shocked that Sage let this mess onto the market in such a condition.

Do yourself a huge favor; if you are considering buying this product, buy anything else. It could not possibly be worse than Act! by Sage Premium for Workgroups. This is one piece of software that definitely needs that "not responsible for collateral damage" in the user agreement.