ACT by Sage 2006: New ACT, Same Success Story Keeping Good Company Wayne Kawamoto
Keeping Good Company
Since you can work with more than one person at a single company, ACT offers features to define and work with contacts in groups. You can create company records and view all notes, history and opportunities associated with various contacts at companies. You can also link contacts to a company, so that when you update company information, ACT automatically updates each contact record as well.
To make the most of your information, ACT's powerful search capabilities can quickly call up data. There are 40 reports to publish phone lists, activities, history and sales summaries, and you can create custom reports and forward reports to Excel, or save them in HTML or PDF formats.
To take data with you, ACT synchronizes its contact, calendar, tasks, notes and history to Palm OS and Pocket PC devices. The program also prints to over 20 popular paper organizers. Multi-user features let up to ten people share data, and administrators can set options and assign and limit access to specific employees.
The program's interface is intuitive and easy to use. Major features are broken down with buttons for Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, Opportunities, E-mail, and Internet Services, and there are clear menu options offered at the top of the screen. The program offers excellent internal links. For example, when you view a company or group and click on an individual employee, the program brings up the employee's contact record.
For a mainstream program, ACT is pretty touchy when it comes to installation. Your system has to be running the latest version of Windows and an up-to-date version of Internet Explorer. The program wouldn't install on one of our test computers because of an acknowledged conflict with security software. After formatting the drive and creating a clean system, the program still wouldn't install because of the Internet Explorer issue.
After upgrading Internet Explorer, the program installed. Once the program was running, a wizard offered excellent help to configure the program.
Against the Competition
While Microsoft Outlook, the popular e-mail client, offers features to manage contacts and schedules, it lacks ACT's higher order features to oversee sales and manage contacts in groups and companies.
At the high end, ACT's main competition comes from Goldmine, which offers superior scheduling features. Small business owners may find specific features in Goldmine that they can use, but ACT does an excellent job of covering Goldmine's basic features. ACT also comes in a more powerful ACT Premium for Workgroups edition that accommodates up to 50 networked seats (versus ten for regular ACT) and that also offers enhanced team and group interactions. It's stronger – but pricier – competition for Goldmine.
The 2006 edition offers all of the features found in ACT 2005. If you have an older version 6.0 or 2004, however, you'll find that 2006 lacks the integrated fax features, support for macros, e-mail, and modem-based synchronization and inbound Caller ID support found in these editions. Another consideration before you upgrade: many add-on products for earlier versions won't work with ACT 2006. But Sage Software says that most 2005 add-ons should work.
For small businesses, ACT 2006 offers a powerful tool to manage everything that has to do with clients. If working with and serving people is your business, you may just want to "act" on this one.
ACT by Sage 2006 has a retail price of $229.99 (upgrade - $149.95). ACT Premium for Workgroups 2006 sells for $399.99 (upgrade - $259.95).
ACT 2006 supports Microsoft Windows XP Home, XP Professional, 2000 Professional, 2000 Server Standard Edition, Server 2003 Standard Edition, Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, Server 2003 Web Edition, and 2003 Small Business Server.
Over the last ten years, Wayne Kawamoto has written over 800 articles, columns and reviews about computers, new technologies, the Internet and small businesses. Wayne has also published three books about upgrading PCs, building office networks and effectively using and troubleshooting notebook computers. You can contact him through his Web site at www.waynewrite.com.
