Technical Details
- The #1 selling contact and customer management solution for over 20 years
- Easily access a complete, integrated view of your contact relationships
- integrates with everyday solutions such as Microsoft Office
Product Details
Product Weight: 0.85 pounds
Shipping Weight: 0.85 pounds
Model: ACTS2009RT
Manufacturer: Sage Software
Sales Rank: 2005
Customer Reviews
Works Great...... Just Keep it Simple,
by Joshua, 2010-06-20
ACT 2009 is my first experience with this product. Normally I never leave reviews, but after reading so much bad press about ACT I just had to throw in my 2 cents.
My job consists of cold calling people and then following up with the most promising contacts. Whether or not I make money depends entirely on being able to remember who I have talked to and what we have talked about. I bought ACT because in the beginning I wrote all of my notes on paper but soon had so many contacts to keep track of that I needed something more reliable.
Now after months of tweaking ACT I feel I have an almost perfect contact management system. The user interfaces for defining fields and changing the layout is very straight forward, and the number of ways that ACT lets you store and search for data is only limited by your imagination. ACT lets me keep track the last time I contacted or attempted to contact someone with Calendar fields. Whether it is easiest to reach a contact in the morning, afternoon, evening, or weekend with check boxes. Timestamped summaries of every phone conversation using the NOTES tab. Information about a contact's current insurance or products I have sold them using drop down boxes. And much, much more.
On a typical day I import a few hundred to a few thousand contacts into act from an excel spreadsheet and perform a look-up to find contacts of a certain age or living in a certain town. Or I might start instead by searching for contacts that I have promised to call that day, mail out information to, follow up with after sending out information earlier, or have just in any other way tagged as a hot lead. Without ACT I would never be able to consistently call the right people at the right time and my most promising contacts would slip through the cracks. It did take a lot of tweaking and playing around with the program to get it to work right, but the payoff has been worth it.
A lot of reviews here talk about ACT slowing down there system or crashing repeatedly. I run ACT on a Toshiba Netbook using a 1.6 GHz atom processor and 1GB of RAM and have not experienced any of these problems. The program does take a minute or so to initialize each morning, but once it gets going everything runs smoothly until I pack up at the end of the day and go home. Looking up contacts is easy, as is making any necessary notes or adjustments to fields.
Perhaps though the reason I have had a good experience with ACT is because my needs are simple. The program does have very strong limitations, but I just find ways of working around them. I tried to make a database and sync it with another computer. It worked at first but then had some trouble so I decided it wasn't worth the hassle. The person who complained about trying to print contact summaries or make reports is right. ACT does a terrible job printing contact reports and it is a lot easier to export a list of contacts to excel first and print from excel. Annoying yes, but an easy fix. And the program comes built with a bunch of factory made fields that will let you change their name but not delete them. I don't need as many fields as the ACT team gave me out of the box. I can delete them from my contact screen so I don't see them, but not from the program's memory. The result is that whenever I want to do a look up I have to wade through a bunch of useless fields to find the one I want to sort by.
I guess the bottom line is that ACT is a great program for someone who just wants to keep things simple. If you are a single user keeping track of simple things like names, and addresses, and who you are supposed to call on a particular day then ACT will work great for you. But if you try to get too fancy and sync it with this program or that, link it to your blackberry, or run a lot of worthless reports then it has its hangups and you will probably experience at least some aggravation. In the final summary it is very user friendly in some ways, but at the same time rigid and full of feature issues that will only let it go so far.
The only thing out there that I know will work better than ACT is if someone wants to spend the time making a custom contact management database with Microsoft Access. My brothers have taken this route for their small business and are having very good success. A custom made Access database can sync with other Access databases, allow multiple users, is a million times more powerful and versatile than ACT, completely malleable to the programmer's whims, and will not suffer from the errors and glitches that ACT seems to be prone to. But then again it will probably take considerably more time to build and maintain- which is why for now at least I am going to stick with ACT.
Don't buy this program,
by John Colburn, 2010-04-30
I have had 3 versions of Act, 4 if you include version 11 which I returned within a couple weeks. I, like a lot of the reviewers on this site upgraded in the hopes of fixing problems. I still use Act, but am working on converting the data to another contact management program. One other note: Act seems to feel that your data is actually theirs. They make it next to impossible to export your data (no key fields will export)
Do NOT buy the program.
no support,
by jerrymarin, 2010-02-19
There is a software problem with ACT which is in all of the latest editions. It uses a SQL2005 (microsoft Windows file).
The issue is that the SQL2005 crashes. The real problem is that you cannot get support without paying $299 for a one year support program.
I wish i never heard of ACT
Ok, My Turn.,
by R. L. Hodges, 2010-01-08
I've used Act! since the DOS days, and then migrated to a few Windows versions. I have loved every version.
However, I simply refuse to upgrade to any "post-Symantec" version. Act! has been a well-known crapware product ever since Sage got a hold of it. The countless reviews one reads on this product all show the same thing - that there is an occasionally lucky user who gets it to run while the vast majority are disgusted with it.
I will simply be disgusted with it BEFORE wasting my time or money on it. After all, there's no rule that says you have to make a mistake yourself to gain wisdom from it - let someone else make it for you.
Look at CRMs fully integrated with outlook,
by P. Crafton, 2009-12-21
I've been using Act for about 9 years now. I've used it to its fullest potential and in some ways it's served its purpose. If you are a salesperson who works by yourself and not In a large office this may work fine for you. If you are someone who works in an office where everyone uses outlook, don't purchase ACT. If they would fully integrate it into outlook it would be a start to becoming a good CRM program.
The other problem I've had with Act is I can't seem to buy a phone that will sync with it unless I buy some additional software. I've used very common phones such as a Treo and Blackberry and neither would sync without additional software and an upgrade to the newest version of Act.
I would have changed years ago but the time it will take to change everything over and learning a new program was way too daunting until now. Each year I keep think Sage will wise up and get it right but I'm done waiting.
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