Product Description

The #1 selling contact and customer manager for over 20 years, ACT! by Sage 2009 (11.0) helps individuals and small business owners work more effectively. Easily access a complete, integrated view of your contact relationships, impress contacts with your follow-up, leave no task undone, and make informed decisions to advance your business. Since ACT! is easy to learn and use, you get up and running quickly. Customize ACT! to fit your business requirements and integrate it with everyday solutions such as Microsoft® Office. With more than 2.8 million individual users, ACT! continues to help customers like you provide superior service.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #555 in Software
• Brand: Sage
• Model: ACTS2009RT
• Released on: 2008-08-22
• Platforms: Windows Vista, Windows XP
• Format: CD-ROM
• Dimensions: 5.70" h x 7.50" w x 2.10" l, .80 pounds

Features

• The #1 selling contact and customer management solution for over 20 years
• Easily access a complete, integrated view of your contact relationships
• integrates with everyday solutions such as Microsoft Office

Customer Reviews

STAY AWAY FROM THIS PROGRAM
I unfortunately started with ACT! 2006!, and upgraded from there one. Every year since then a new version came out at about $100+ for the upgrade, and instead of cutting my losses, I purchased each upgrade. about $800 dollars later, I've had enough. Please note that I have never written reviews, but became so jaded about this program that I felt I had no other choice. Also, please note that I use act on my computer and my assistants.

This program is horrendous. It is extremely slow, crashes constantly, and has tons of error messages. I remember upgrading to 2009 just so that I could get another few months of tech support. It seemed as if the upgrade cost would make sense, considering their crappy support charges by the minute. Anyway it wasn't and now I am looking into getting my database converted (my biggest issues being the notes) at this I don't care how much I spend on the conversion, or even If I have to retype all my notes over. I hate this program, and will literally toss it out of my window as soon as I can. Trust me, look for an alternative. If you don't mind the effort, attempt in creating a database on filemaker, or just use outlook.

I wish I'd read these reviews before I bought... ACT! is dreadful
After 19 years in the IT industry I thought I knew how to pick good software... ACT! seemed safe enough; it's been around forever so they *must* have worked the bugs out, right? Very professional packaging, sold everywhere, all the 'safety' signs are there...

Well I was wrong. Another review called ACT! 'snake oil' and I'd say that's pretty close to the mark.

The first thing I noticed was that the quality of the printed reports (phone lists was my main interest) was horrible - actually horrible to the point of being illegible and unusable. The marketing material rants about how you can print in collins-debden / filofax / etc formats though their wonderful templates but believe me, you'd be better off hiring a blind heroin addict to handwrite your address pages. It would be both cheaper and more legible.

Then there's the debacle over Windows Update - ACT is written so badly that when Windows Update did its thing, ACT had a hissy fit and self-destructed. ACT took weeks to do anything about it, and I lost many frustrating hours diagnosing and fixing (by the way, I used to work inside ITG - the division of Microsoft Tech Support that gives tech support to Microsoft internal staff, so it's not like I'm a newbie at this stuff).

(Also, by the way, the computer of interest is a brand-spanking new business-type Dell, with nothing on it but Windows XP, a good virus checker, and ACT.)

Then after fixing that and using for a couple of weeks the crashing began... then more crashing, then the 100% cpu hanging, then the strange inability to select 'calender' - ever. When I looked at the ACT! user forums the answer was clear - LOTS of users have LOTS of problems with ACT. I was not alone in having problems or being frustrated and feeling cheated of time and money.

That's the big gripes, now the small ones. The user interface is a joke - version 11? What have they been doing between versions? This looks like software did in the early 90's. Then there's the slowness... I just can't figure out why ACT is so slow... this type of database should present no challenge of ANY kind to today's computers, contact management is the computer science equivelant of assembling brightly coloured alphabet building blocks to spell ' C A T '.

ACT technical support staff are just blame-shifters. While reading the forums I read all sorts of nonsense. One support staffer told a customer 'I suspect your problem is that you have a 5400rpm hard drive' - this is CONTACT MANAGEMENT - Not magnetic resonance imaging of the centre of a neutron star! At Microsoft I ran a two Gigabyte SQL Server customer database on 5400rpm drives with a pentium 400 at the helm - a long long time ago so ANY computer today should EAT a small contact database alive. ACT like telling people they need supercomputers because the average joe doesn't realise just how simpe contact management is from an IT perspective and it gets the customer off the phone. That was the worst of the cop-outs I heard, but there were LOTS of others.

I've seen some bad code in my time, but I shudder to think what must be happening at ACT... To have this many problems at version 11, to have performance issues running 1990's software on 2009 computers, to be so sloppy in coding that ACT doesn't work with Data Execute Prevention and Windows Update (two critical Microsoft security features) and with bad tech support to boot...

This morning I uninstalled ACT and a sense of calm and happiness washed over me. I also feel wiser, like the time I got mugged on a train on which I'd foolishly sat too far from the guards compartment at night. This has been a lot like that experience actually, mildly expensive, fairly frustrating, and I won't make that mistake again.

Lost all my data!
Miserable program! Nothing I've done gives me access to my database now...I've lost huge amounts of data even though I've kept a full backup myself...it won't let me open my backup! Don't buy this program!