Thread: Complex Contact Management

CT! BY SAGE 2009 IS THE NEWEST VER-sion of the widely used contact management software. This app lets you bring together many different kinds of information about individual contacts, groups of contacts, and whole companies, so it's great for keeping track of your calls, e-mails, and letters to business prospects and customers. ACT! excels at gathering dozens of different kinds of contact information on a single screen, but this also means that the interface can be intimidating, especially for new users.

ACT! not only tracks your communications, builds mass mailings on paper or e-mail, and alerts you with to-do lists, it also shares your calendar and other data across your company or, in more advanced versions, across a whole enterprise. You can live almost your whole professional life in ACT!, using it to launch e-mails from Outlook or to fire up Microsoft Word to send mass mailingsand you can even use its built-in low-frills word processor if you don't want to be overwhelmed by Word.
The basic ACT! interface is similar to that of earlier versions, and reasonably well organized for the amount of data it supports. It includes sidebar icons for many features and a dashboard that displays a set of brightly colored charts showing the number of activities you've performed, the opportunities you've followed up on, sales you've closed, and other items that you can manually add to the display.



Over the years, the product has built up a staggeringly extensive feature set, but it's still weighed down by a few clumsy interface flaws. For example, too much of the program uses ACT!'s special-purpose vocabulary instead of plain English. There is, however, improved Outlook integration in which ACT! automatically records your e-mail activity and uses your Outlook message-sorting rules. You can also back up your data automatically at almost any interval you choose.

Thanks to its new lookup features & expanded Outlook integration, ACT! 2009 is an essential upgrade for existing users. Potential new users should prepare for a rough initiation period before they can manage this app's dazzlingly wide and powerful range of functions.-Edward Mende/son