ACT! 2006 Premium for Workgroups

Other products by Sage

Product Features

• Increase productivity by centralizing critical customer information, appointments, and documents
• Boost team productivity with advanced functionality designed specifically for workgroups
• Centralize administration and deployment for easy roll-out to end users
• Securely control database access with advanced contact and user security
• Automate key aspects of the sales cycle for better forecasting and tracking

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B000AP41XM
• Item model number: ACTP2006RT
• Date first available at Amazon.com: August 25, 2005
• Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #10,074 in Software (See Bestsellers in Software)

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  Software > Business & Office > Schedule & Contact Management

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description
ACT! 2006 Premium for Workgroups is ideal for small businesses and workgroups or divisions of larger organizations. Not only is it a top contact and customer information management program for sales professionals, it is also a solution for managers and administrators that provides advanced workgroup functionality for administration, deployment, and security.

Keep critical customer information up to date with database synchronization and backup.

Schedule database backup and synchronization to occur automatically.

Silent Install helps you distribute ACT! to your entire team.

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.

ACT! 2006 Premium for Workgroups will help boost your team productivity by providing advanced workgroup functionality. Keep critical customer information up to date with pre-arranged and automatic database synchronization and backup. Group scheduling gives everyone in the database at-a-glance user availability, the ability to determine resources, and a task bar notification when a meeting is sent.

Special administration and deployment features are designed to meet the needs of large teams and workgroups. For instance, ACT! can be installed, activated and registered on the server and then pushed to users on the network, eliminating the need to install it on each worker's computer. User preferences can be set by the administrator, or each user can change preferences to meet their own, individual needs. ACT! Premium for Workgroups features five security levels, and administrators can assign levels to Standard users to control who can delete data or export to Microsoft Excel to enforce security. Contact access can be similarly controlled.

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. It 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.

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!.

Customizable opportunity fields help ensure data consistency.

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.

Product Description
ACT! by Sage Premium for Workgroups 2006 is the #1 best-selling contact and customer manager that helps corporate workgroups and sales teams make contact, build relationships, and get results. ACT! provides advanced workgroup functionality for administration, security, and opportunity tracking for up to 50 users. Your team can access and share information to grow productive business relationships. Offering a low total cost of ownership, ACT! can improve your team's bottom line by forecasting and tracking customer opportunities. ACT! can be tailored to specific business requirements and integrates with the tools your team uses everyday, such as Microsoft Office, Lotus Notes, and handheld devices.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Avoid Like The Plague, March 10, 2006

By	Clifford Haugen (Philadelphia, PA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The product is terrible, the support is worse. Trying to run "Premium" version on SQL. Hijacks SQL server. Sets its own SQL admin password and ACT won't tell you what it is. Need to uninstall SQL (including any other databases you may have running on that server) to re-install ACT. ZERO integration with enterprise backup software. Proprietary scheduler is buggy, buggy, buggy. I have spent two weeks fighting with this software and this ridiculous company. Save your money and your hair - buy something, anything, else.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A waste of time and money. DON'T BUY, April 20, 2006

By	Software Manager (Houston) - See all my reviews

I bought the $1,100.00 Act 2006 premium for workgroups (5 users plus server). Three people in our organization tried it and I made a HUGE effort to work with the product (since I recommended it). All copies have been un-installed, no one liked it nor could work with it. Maybe some people that only work at their desk in an office can use this product but if you are a salesman or a mobile profesional with a Laptop this product is not for you.

The first thing you will notice with ACT (from 2005 and forward) is that it will make your computer SUPER slow. And this is because it installs SQL server and loads it EVERY time you boot up. So right after you install ACT you will see your boot time go from 30 seconds to above three minutes. Don't even think that I have a slow computer. I have a Dell XPS-1710 with Pentium-M 2ghz, 2gb of ram and video card with 256Mb. I don't understand why Sage assumes every time you start your computer you are going to use ACT.

Next thing you will see is that if you buy ACT you better RUSH to get it installed and become an expert with it and use all the features and ALL possible configurations because their support EXPIRES AFTER 30 DAYS. So if you are a busy professional which buys the product but doesn't have time to do all this right away you will find yourself calling for support as you are installing for the first time a month and a half later AND YOU ARE OUT OF LUCK. Pay up, sign a support contract. Since we bought the "premium" edition I think we got three months of support but that was it. Our server crashed months later and I had issues re-installing, I called "sorry your support period has expired".

Next thing you will see is that you have to sacrifice Outlook. ACT has an email editor like Outlook or it bridges to outlook but integration is lousy. No more easily receiving or sending vcards, attachments in received emails show up as a weird binary file half the time, an enormous mountain of issues. Everything with ACT is painful, even things that work are awkward.

When our server crashed I went to Sage's web site to take a look at their knowledgebase. Sage has REMOVED the access to their knowledgebase so you don't even have that to help you troubleshoot. They have a simple FAQs section that doesn't help at all with the issues and errors you will encounter. I don't blame them for removing the access because I was in shock when I first saw the amount and type of issues the product had.

After a year of trying to work with this product we have all uninstalled it. Nice features but lousy lousy implementation.

Stay away from this product. Buy Microsoft Business Contact Manager add-on for Outlook 2003.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Absymal is not the word!!!, June 14, 2006

By	Paul Lemonidis (Ilford, Essex United Kingdom) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This software is the biggest joke I have ever come across quite frankly Despite telling you it is a network application when you try and create a database on a network drive or point it to a network drive it says the database must be stored locally!!!!!???? So you then create a local database and tell it to point to a shared network location. They even give instructions on how to to create the network share! But guess what. This worked for a day then just suddenly died! Best of all despite the application clearly pointing to the same database file on the network drive the contents when viewed from more than one location were not the same!! Quite frankly! I have built Microsoft Exchange 2003 server with full AD in less time and with considerably less effort. Nothing could be worse than this application. It is anti-intuitive and user hostile all around!