Product Description

ACT! by Sage 2007 (9.0) is the #1 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. Renowned for its ease of use, ACT! offers robust integration with the tools you use everyday, such as Microsoft® Office*, Lotus Notes®*, accounting products, and handheld devices. Use mail merge and e-mail to deliver marketing campaigns, forecast and track customer opportunities, and generate reports for a complete view of customer interactions. *(See www.act.com/2007systreq for details.)

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3303 in Software
• Brand: Sage
• Model: ACTS2007RT
• Released on: 2006-09-18
• Platforms: Windows XP, Windows 2000
• Format: CD-ROM
• Dimensions: 3.00 pounds

Features

• The #1 selling contact and customer manager worldwide; keeps track of all your contact and customer information in a single location
• Integration with Lotus Notes, Outlook Express and Outlook lets you efficiently track all your correspondence
• Ideal for traveling; links to a Palm OS or Pocket PC device to synchronize your ACT! Calendar, Contacts, To-Do information, Notes, and History items
• Synchronizes with Microsoft Outlook calendars to schedule appointments with colleagues not using ACT
• Improved search functionality and greater integration with Outlook over previous versions

Amazon.com
Act! By Sage 2007 enables individuals and small business customers 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. Renowned for its ease of use, ACT! can be tailored by each user and offers robust integration with the tools you use everyday, such as Microsoft Office, Lotus Notes, accounting products, and handheld devices. With more than 2.5 million individual users and 30,000 corporate customers, ACT! is the #1 selling contact and customer manager worldwide.

Enter virtually unlimited date- and time-stamped Notes and History to track every relationship detail. View larger.

Organize all of your contact data in one place for quick and easy access. View larger.

Stay on top of your schedule and prioritize tasks so you are productive. View larger.

Forecast and track sales opportunities for an improved bottom line. View larger.

Access and report on information quickly and easily. View larger.

Organize Your Contacts
ACT! is a single, central repository for critical contact and customer information captured across your business. It enables you to access detailed contact and customer information, manage calendars and activities, capture all customer communications, track opportunities through the sales process, and report on overall effectiveness.

With ACT! you can track complete customer data, including all contact details, your personal notes and customer history, appointments and vital to-do items, documents, and more. Offering over 60 pre-defined fields for each contact, you can easily sort and track your customers by any number of characteristics. The software even lets you attach documents directly into your customer's account information. If you are in Microsoft Word and Excel, you can easily attach documents and spreadsheets to ACT! contacts so it's easy to quickly locate vital information such as presentations, proposals, and quotes. Advanced customization features let you design your own layouts, and you can move relevant field displays to suit the unique needs of your business.

Stay in Touch and Connected
ACT!'s Contact Record lets you track all of your critical contact and customer communications for quick and easy referencing. With the software's e-mail client integrated with Lotus Notes or Microsoft Outlook Express, or integrated directly with Outlook, you can send outbound e-mails to contacts and create contact history on the Contact Record. ACT!'s Mail Merge feature even allows you to correspond with multiple contacts, either via e-mail or paper correspondence, and automatically tracks a history on each Contact record.

A built-in word processor that supports tables, graphics, HTML and spell checking makes it easy to write letters directly from ACT! You can select a group of contacts and perform a mail merge to a letter or e-mail. Best of all, a history is automatically generated on each contact record every time you send correspondence. With ACT! you'll never lose track of your past correspondence again.

Prioritize Your Work
ACT! can help you stay on top of your deliverables by offering multiple calendar views, including daily and customizable work week views. Calls, meetings, and to-do items can be filtered by priority, date range, or user, and you can display totals for each type of activity. Built-in activity alarms will help you stay on top of all your time-sensitive deliverables, so you'll always be ahead of the game with your contacts. If you rely on communicating with colleagues who are not using ACT!, you can also synchronize your ACT! calendar with their Microsoft Outlook calendar to facilitate appointment scheduling and tasks.

Track Sales Opportunities
ACT! enables you to track sales opportunities from the initial inquiry through the closing to utilize the standard sales process, or you can create a customized process to suit your business. When working an opportunity, simply click follow-up and a new activity will be created automatically with details, thereby ensuring the prospect is managed as it moves through the process. The product list lets you easily enter repeated products or services, and can automatically fill in information such as name, item number, cost, and price. ACT! also gives you the options of choosing from over 20 pre-formatted Sales Reports, or exporting to Microsoft Excel with a single click for further analysis using built-in, customizable pivot tables.

Information on the Go
If you are on the road with your business, you can take your critical contact and customer information with you no matter where you go. With ACT!, you can link to a Palm OS or Pocket PC device to synchronize your ACT! Calendar, Contacts, To-Do information, Notes, and History items. Are you still using a paper organizer when you're out of the office? Don't fret! ACT! features over 20 printable templates designed for popular paper organizers so you always have your schedule with you.

Customer Reviews

Don't do it!
Dear Lord! I've been an ACT! user for over 11 years, coming up through Windows 3.X and even administering a 7-user (13,000+ contact)ACT! network. Those of us who are old hands at ACT! know that the program can be a wonderful slave and a terrible master. Such is the case with lots of crucial technology.
My last upgrade was to 2005. That one went off without a hitch. Since I decided to register that time, I've been getting 'Upgrade to 2007' emails from Sage for about 9 months. I normally will ignore these solicitations, but the 'integration with Outlook' feature caught my eye. I went ahead and downloaded the program (giant 250+mb file)last Monday.
After backing up my ACT! data to 3 separate locations, I proceeded with my install. Virus software 'off', closed all non-essential programs, etc. This thing was a mess from the get-go. After failing to start the install process several times, I called support, and after about 55 minutes of hold time, was handed off to a nice woman named Muralidharan who spent the next THREE HOURS on the line with me deleting individual items from the registry, downloading patches from Microsoft, etc. At the end of that ordeal, we had a successful install, meaning the program would run.
Next up was converting my database. That actually went smoothly, just humming along and proclaimimg success at the end. When I opened said database, I was pleased to see my contacts intact and even displayed in the template I had customized. Excited, I went to check my calendar, since that's the main screen I use. No calendar items. Check to see if the filters are out of whack-nope. Items show on the task list, and future to-dos, calls, and meetings show under each individual contact's 'activities' tab, but there was no way in Hades I could get it to show up on the Calendar. Regarding the Outlook functionality-it's not there if you use Word as your Outlook email editor. If you don't use Word, it's still a clunky, lame interface that requires a special ACT! address book in Outlook, etc.
Back to tech support. a 45 minute wait connected me to a very nice person who listened to my woes and promptly disconnected me. The next person I spoke with, after a nearly 1 hour hold (nice New-Age hold muzak, btw), was equally as friendly but apparently suffered fronm the same phone problems as the prior tech, since he disconnected while putting me on hold.
Fast forward to today. I fired up the evil box for a day in the office, hit the ACT! launch button, and watched it load significantly faster than I had remembered. Heartened, I waited for the activities to roll over. I can tell you now-I think I'd still be waiting for that rollover if I hadn't killed the process. I watched an hourglass for about ten minutes before doing a cold boot and retrying. Same result. Last straw.
I called ACT! and requested a refund. After a (surprise!)30 minute wait, I was connected with a gentleman who credited me back for my full purchase price. For the record, everyone I've dealt with at Sage has been helpful and friendly. One person I spoke with (likely NOT on a recorded line!) even lamented that the product may have been brought to market 'prematurely'.
Bottom line: There's no compelling reason to 'upgrade', and many, many reasons not to.

It's the performance, stupid
Wow -- I am a new ACT user, having bought ACT 2007 just a couple weeks ago. I'd never used any earlier version of ACT. I did a lot of research on line, for a LONG time, looking for the contact/client management software that would fit my needs. I never really found it.

Anyway, my biggest complaint here, as others have said, is that the performance with ACT 2007 is just apalling. You click on "Weekly Calendar" or "Opportunities List", and it can take 30 to 40 seconds before the screen finally refreshes. And none of the other programs on my computer perform this poorly -- and I use older versions of SQL Server on the same computer, which is the same database ACT uses.

In terms of features, I just don't understand how a program that costs so much really offers so little, ultimately. I run a real estate referral business, so I need to link contacts to one another. That is, a client to an agent. More specifically, multiple clients to a single agent. I have yet to find software that lets me do this in any efficient way. Even with ACT, all I can do is create a "company" which is basically the agent him/herself (which doesn't really work, because they also work for companies) and then assign the clients to them. The interface is busy and complicated, and I spend way too much time trying to figure out how to use this software.

I don't usually like to write such negative reviews unless I have something better to suggest, but in this case: UGH. Keep looking, that's all I can offer.

Beware! This Sage is not very wise
I've used ACT! since it was a DOS product. For some of you youngsters, DOS was Windows' predecessor and didn't have any icons or mice. I know it sounds like a hardship, but we were pretty proficient at typing our commands.

Anyway, I've watched ACT! as it was sold, repurchased, sold again and again and each time the quality decreased and the arrogance increased. This is a typical, yet unfortunate trend for large software developers. Their stockholders become more important than their customers. This is the case with ACT! 2007.

It was promoted and hyped with the best traditional talent left on Madison Ave, yet the software is faulty and produces unintelligible error messages like, "ERROR: Object reference not set to an instance of an object." I'm sure that message was crafted by the department of redundancy department.

I run my small business on ACT!, we'd be lost without it. I spent nearly $1,300 USD for a 10-user ACT! 2007 license and called yesterday to ask for my money back. I try every new version that ACT releases and keep returning to ACT! 6.0 which is the last version that worked as advertised and ironically is no longer supported.

Actually, not being supported is a blessing, since support is out-sourced to India. I've called them 3 times in past 24 hours and waited on hold for more than 45 minutes before each call as connected. The quality of VoIP connections plus thick Indian accents made for frustrating call experiences, but the crowning event came when the support technician, after putting our call on hold 3 times to "further research this matter," finally called me back to explain that I would have to upgrade to the Premium version in order to synchronize my two remote databases with the our network server.

Now, I've been synchronizing remote ACT! databases for years (not perfectly, but I learned to work around the shortcomings) and I consider this to be core functionality. Sage, evidently does not. According to Sage's Indian technician, I can synchronize my remote databases as long as they are attached to our network and behind a firewall, but I cannot synchronize using the Internet outside a firewall.

This is unbelievable, because if I was attached to my local area network (LAN) and safe and secure behind our firewall, I would be in my office and wouldn't need to synchronize. Duh! The synchronization functionality serves remote offices and people like me who travel well beyond the LAN.

To deliver cryptic error messages is common among most software developers, but to remove core functionality from a $1,300 product does not make for a wise Sage.