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System Requirements
Product Features
- Track company records
- share notes and histories between contacts
- 5 calendar views
- export to Microsoft Excel
- Enhanced database synchronisation
- import product lists
- new layout designer
- new contact and history tab
- new opportunity list view
- new mail merge features
Product details
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Product Description
Manufacturer's Description
Sage is happy to introduce its latest CRM offering, ACT!Professional. Working on Windows 2000 and above ACT!Professional offers additional key features which enhances it's performance and customer productivity.
ACT! is the best-selling contact and customer management solution. With more than 4 million users worldwide, ACT! is relied upon by companies globally as their contact and customer communications hub, providing upto-the-minute information about their business relationships and sales opportunities instantly.
Key Features and Benefits
Instant access to contact and customer information
Complete contact information: Stores complete contact information including e-mail messages, notes and history items, attachments, documents, field data, activity information, sales opportunities and much more.
An intuitive interface: Intuitive interface and workflow design makes it easier to use than ever before.
Forecasting and sales opportunities
Multiple sales processes: Create multiple sales processes. ACT! Professional comes with built-in standard sales processes, easily customisable to meet your company's needs.
Product List: Create a product list and capture information such as price, cost, and itemnumber. Simply import your own list to avoid manually re-entering this information.
Accounting integration
Integration with Sage Accounts: ACT! Professional easily links Sage Instant Accounts, Sage Line 50 and Sage MMS (purchased separately, Available January 2005).
Scheduling events and resources
Schedule resources easily:Schedule resources so you'll always have access to the meeting room and equipment you need, conflict checking ensures resources have not been double booked.
Meeting invitations: Send meeting invitations to keep your entire team on schedule with ease. When you schedule a meeting for users in the database, a notification appears on their status bar. Users can accept and decline these invitations.
Easily import data from Microsoft Outlook
Easily exchange data with Outlook: Make ACT! Professional work the way you do by easily importing contact information from Outlook, to reduce unnecessary data-entry duplication, and get new users up and running quickly.
Synchronisation
Advanced Synchronisation: Reliable and accurate synchronisation allows you to synchronise with no lost productivity, giving you the most up to date information all of the time.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
21 of 21 people found the following review helpful
I've had Act!6 for a couple of years, but never really got on with it. I'd periodically revive it to see if it could help run my small business, but found it awkward and unfriendly and not worth the agro. This was a shame as the core functionality would have been very useful to me.
However, I was delighted when Amazon brought the latest version to my attention. Could this be the answer to my prayers? I wanted to try a demo version before splashing out any more cash, and for this I had to phone Sage who put one in the post very quickly. Initially when I started up Act! Pro I was disappointed - it looked similar and I assumed it would be similarly awkward.
Far from it.
Although this version doesn't seem radically different - many of the changes are subtle - the overall effect is a vastly more friendly and useful product. It's easier to make it do what you want, even if many of these functions might have been there in some form in the past.
The new version makes it really easy to setup new fields, automatically place contacts in groups according to various rules, and it's much easier to select data and export to Excel. It also makes it very easy to mail-merge letters or emails. The interface is more pleasant to use, and it encourages you to explore the functionality more and make use of a very powerful system.
I particularly like the Follow-up actions on the Opportunities screen, which makes scheduling follow up calls or letters a breeze. This version also allows you to setup multiple contacts per company, and track contact history for the company as a whole. I've also found it reasonably easy to setup a shared database so I can work on the info with a colleague.
On the downsides, the Help system is surprisingly poor. It's not that it isn't comprehensive, it's just hard work to get to the info you need. The indexing system means that even topics that precisely match your search words can be hidden way down a list, and the help topics themselves have a tendency to tell you that there is a way to do what you want to do, but won't tell you how. There seems to be a bug with the Help system, whereby sometimes when you press Help the screen won't appear. I've not yet found a solution apart from closing and re-opening the software.
That being said, you do get 30 days of free support from Sage when you register, and it would be worth capitalising on this big time to get your system running the way you want.
Another downer is that Act! doesn't complete the Sales process by providing some form of order-taking and fulfilment function. This seems a bit daft as you have a good system for qualifying Contacts, leading them down the sales path until at last you've converted them to a buyer, and then you're on your own. You can probably achieve this by linking to Sage's additional Accounting packages, although their basic Instant Accounts version lacks some fairly essential functionality, and to get order processing on their "grown-up" Line 50 System involves about £900 more software. Ouch.
Pocket-PC or Palm users please note, at time of writing this version of Act! will currently only synchronise data one-way to your handheld. Any changes made on the hand-held will not be reflected on the main system. They say this add-on should be available early in 2005.
Overall, from a purely functional viewpoint, this may seem to be a modest improvement on the previous version. But from a usability and usefulness perspective, I have found it very much better. I'm actually enjoying using it which is not something that could be said for Act!6.
Amazon's price is very good - cheaper than going direct. However, if you're upgrading from an existing version, then at the time of writing Amazon doesn't yet have Upgrade stock so you may need to go direct to Sage - £102.
Overall, it's certainly worth the upgrade. The new version is very much more useful, and I'm now using it as my main contact management system. I've given it 4 stars because the help system is below par, and it could do with providing some more examples on how to use it to solve various business process issues. It's also a bit "buggy" though you can expect fixes to follow on shortly from Sage. Meanwhile I wouldn't hesitate to buy or upgrade to this, Act! is now a genuinely useful and usable product.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
I like it!
In response to the previous reviews,
I am aware that there have been certain issues with the software on first release but please do remember that alot of the initial issues have been addressed within the free update patch 7.01 available from Best Software.
It is true at first the software seems to lag behind previous versions of act however it storms past them in spectacular style with what it now does for the user, the overall functionality in the program is great and it give you a more rewarding experience.
I have emailed the developers of the software and they assure me that the software is under constant development and that all update patches and fixes will be available for free.
Amazon Verified Purchase
In a previous incarnation, I used to use Act! when it was sold by Symantec. It was robust, reliable, reasonably quick and did the job. When I bought 'Act! Professional', little did I think that the change of ownership to Sage would have wrought so much damage to what was a perfectly good product.
A simply dreadful piece of software. It is slow, clunky, and falls over at the drop of a hat. It is the ONLY programme we run which is able to stop a PC dead in its tracks. It routinely crashes midway through a mailmerge, or through a print run. It's own text editor is a totally unreliable application, and we were able to generate better results by exporting to Word, although it still manages to insert old dates where there is no merge field. Frequently, it will simply miss off the first digit of postcodes in the final merged document, just because it feels like it. Unbelievable! How Sage remains in business with this degree of dereliction is beyond me.
If you value your sanity or business, please, please...DON'T BUY THIS PRODUCT!!!!
I have given this a one-star rating, because it seemed churlish to go lower - but I was tempted. One star means that the software did come on a CD, was enclosed within a box, and did not come with viruses on the disk. But that's about it!
A simply dreadful piece of software. It is slow, clunky, and falls over at the drop of a hat. It is the ONLY programme we run which is able to stop a PC dead in its tracks. It routinely crashes midway through a mailmerge, or through a print run. It's own text editor is a totally unreliable application, and we were able to generate better results by exporting to Word, although it still manages to insert old dates where there is no merge field. Frequently, it will simply miss off the first digit of postcodes in the final merged document, just because it feels like it. Unbelievable! How Sage remains in business with this degree of dereliction is beyond me.
If you value your sanity or business, please, please...DON'T BUY THIS PRODUCT!!!!
I have given this a one-star rating, because it seemed churlish to go lower - but I was tempted. One star means that the software did come on a CD, was enclosed within a box, and did not come with viruses on the disk. But that's about it!
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