Act! By Sage 2007

List Price: $229.99 Discount Price: $32.50

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

Accessories:

PC World

Customer Reviews:

Act 2007 works FAST and FINE with right system. [Posted on 2008-03-05]
I ordered ACT 2007 (got a great price on 2007 vs 2008. Shop around). After buying, I read all the negative reviews and figured I was in the deep stuff. However, I found quite the opposite.

As a background - I converted 6500 contacts from Goldmine using conversion software. I left GM because it is not supported any longer and was getting a little paranoid about the consequences of major problems.

Of course there were some duplications and minor errors in the conversion but nothing major. There is also a learning curve for a new user and some quirks as with any program. However, the format is much, much more user friendly for a smaller company (4 users) than is GM.

The major concern to others seems to be speed. Not for us. We are on a peer to peer XP network. We keep one machine dedicated to data storage with no users on it. We did update to all new Dell Vostro and Optiplex machines with 2.0 GHZ or better and a minimum of 1 GB RAM, 80 GB drives. The response from the ACT program is instantaneous. I do not know if the speed problems everyone is complaining about is a function of old slow equipment, converting from prior versions, slow network, or what. Our ACT is fast.

Now I have to admit the manual is crap (aren't they all?). For the first time in 20 years I subscribed to a support contract. I suspected that it would be a lot cheaper with a new and fairly complicated program than beating my head against the wall trying to figure out those little quirks. I was right. I have already recouped the $200 cost with a couple of phone calls. The quality and courtesy surprised me. The contract covers 13 months for less than the price of one license at retail. And as a bonus, you get to talk to real live Americans who actually know something about the program. (Listen up HP. I don't want to talk to India). I also bough ACT for Dummies. Very useful book so far.

I wonder if anyone doing exactly the same as we did has the same concerns about speed as some of the other reviewers. I gave 5 it stars so people would see that the program is not the junk others are calling it. However because of the manual it really should be 4.5 stars.

Too much time spent supporting ACT for my users [Posted on 2008-05-14]
My experience with ACT comes from the support side, as I provide IT support at my company and provide help for all things ACT. ACT seems to do the job for my users, but it is a nightmare & time-hog from a support perspective. Any upgrade, update, database conversion, or data import I've ever done has resulted in erors and calls to technical support, and this after I've already researched or downloaded step-by-step articles describing how to do it! The Remote Sync takes much time to set up, and any update or change done to ACT requires you to completely reconfigure each user's ACT settings in order to sync. Very inefficient, doable as long as you document the 200 steps that need to be done. My experience with tech support has been good, they always resolve the issue, it just gets old having to call them so often, and is time-consuming.

The last straw came after upgrading to ACT 2006. It slowed laptops down to a crawl. Not just ACT, but everything, including Windows, ran slow on the laptops with ACT installed. Part of the reason (I found after several calls to tech support), is that ACT had introduced new "services" (Stayrunning & Preload) that continually run in the background. These services could be permanently turned off only by doing a reg hack. This sped things up a bit, but some users still complained of slowness and having to wait 30 seconds to open a Word file. So we have uninstalled ACT from most of our laptops, at the request of the laptop users.

ACT 2007 SOFTWARE [Posted on 2008-06-09]
PREFERRED CONTACT MANAGER FOR OUR OFFICE OF SALES REPS, 4TH UPGRADE. HANDLES MULTIPLE USERS WITH ONE DATABASE. WOULD LIKE TO SEE BETTER SUPPORT AND MORE COMPATIBILITY WITH HANDHELDS OF VARIOUS KINDS.

Act 2007 doesn't work with Vista [Posted on 2008-06-11]
I had Act 2003 working on 3 computers, then I had to upgrade to 2007 because Sage wouldn't support the older version any more. I had to get a new CPU for one system for the Act 2007 to work on it. Then another system crashed and I had to buy a new one. This one has to have Vista on it because that's what they all come with now. So I get Act installed on the new Vista operating system and find out it doesn't work on Vista, so now, after 1 year of use, I have to upgrade to 2008 for the new system which won't sync with the other computers anymore...I don't understand why they pushed so hard for everyone to buy a system that won't work on any new computer and why they just can't do a fix for 2007! What a rip off!

Sage will not refund money. [Posted on 2008-06-13]
I have written Sage 3 times in one year for a refund for ACT 2007, which is an awful product. This is warning they will ignore you.

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