ACT by Sage 2009: Making a Great Contact Manager Better What's New in ACT 2009 Wayne Kawamoto
When faces vaguely ring bells, names elusively reside at the tip of your tongue, or you simply need a better way to effectively manage contacts in our electronic age, you're probably a candidate for ACT by Sage 2009, the latest version of the well-known contact manager.
A virtual lifeline for business owners, sale professionals, and company representatives, contact managers such as ACT — one of the few that remains from a once deep pool of competitors — help you manage contacts and track your interactions with them.
ACT not only manages contact information of the name-address-phone-number-e-mail variety, it also schedules activities and tasks and records contact-related communications such as e-mail messages, letters, proposals, and phone calls, as well as your own observations and notes. ACT remains a superb program and does a great job of managing the entire sales process from meet-and-greet to closing and beyond.
Getting Its ACT Together
In version 2009, ACT increases its integration with Microsoft Outlook and enhances its database search capabilities. While these may sound like incremental improvements, the new Outlook integration makes the program a worthy upgrade — something that's all too rare these days in an era of empty "upgrades."
ACT comes in a standard version for individuals and small businesses and in a Premium version for larger teams and corporate workgroups. ACT Premium adds team-oriented features such as the Dashboard that serves team views and oversees contacts and activities, as well as activity reports that you can break down by user. Most important, Premium allows you to view the calendar's activities for ten or more people. Premium also adds Web access in its Corporate Edition.
From here, the sky is seemingly the limit with various ACT flavors — for example, one for financial professionals and another for people in real estate. Sage also offers add-ons to integrate ACT with a BlackBerry, Pocket PC, or Treo Smartphone as well as add-ons for linking with accounting programs such as Peachtree and QuickBooks.
New in ACT 2009
ACT now offers a feature called "En masse e-mail attaching." This lets you select multiple Microsoft Outlook e-mails — from different senders — and quickly attach them to the contact of your choice. Now, within Outlook, you can click on an ACT button to easily attach an e-mail to an ACT contact.
Another new feature lets you rely on Outlook rules to manage your inbox e-mail. Using this, for example, you can configure the system so any e-mail from a particular contact automatically becomes a part of a contact's ACT history.
You can also create ACT activities from within Outlook e-mails, which is useful for scheduling follow-ups, meetings, or tasks. You can copy an ACT calendar to an Outlook calendar with a single click from the main ACT toolbar, and vice versa.
ACT has enhanced lookups so you can search for a contact using only a part of a name or title. For example, you can type in "manager" and pull up all the permutations: sales manager, warehouse manager, etc. You can conveniently switch between contacts, groups, or companies to modify searches without starting over. And you can access advanced queries from the main lookup toolbar to carry over and refine previous searches — a big convenience.
The program also now offers fast access to your most recent contact lookups, which lets you view these lookups by type, date, time stamp, and number of contacts.
And finally, you can apply calendar filters to printouts. Yes, you can now print ACT calendars based on priorities and date ranges — and display selected users — just the way that you see them on screen. This feature was long, long overdue.
Previously available only in the ACT Premium edition, you can now automate tasks such as copying calendars and backing up databases in the basic version of ACT. There's also an improved status bar that lets you view the progress of database synchronization and the time that remains in the process.
