“Ask Charlie,” in which customers like you ask business-solution related questions of Charlie Kemmerer, MCG’s Vice-President of Front Office Solutions.

Question:

Dear Charlie: We are thinking about upgrading our ACT! to the new 2006 version. Do you have any suggestions?

Signed, Wondering in Washington.

Answer:

Dear Wondering: There are tons of suggestions. However, I thought it might be simpler if I passed along Sage Software's ACT! 2006 Upgrade Considerations outlined below! It's rather long-winded but informative. I hope this helps!

Good luck!

ACT! 2006 Upgrade Considerations

Company Level Records: Introduced in ACT! 2005 managing contacts associated with the same company at a Company Level.  This allows you to see all the contacts and their history, activity and opportunities at this Company level.  Further allowing you to track information in fields that are applicable to Companies like Annual Revenue, Number of Employees, Address, and Phone information, rather than tracking that information on a Contact level. 

ACT! 2006 improves this functionality by adding a hyper link from the Contact Detail View to the Company View, improving the navigation from a Contact to the associated Company. 

Dynamic Group Membership:  With ACT! Classic, you could create Group rules that would populate a group based on either a field or a saved query, but that occurred only when a user manually ran Group Rules in the database. 

With ACT! 2005, you could create a criteria based on the content of a Contact field or fields and this would dynamically link all contacts to that Group without any manual intervention from a user. 

ACT! 2006 has a new feature that allows you to see both manually added or “static” Group membership, as well as dynamic Group membership. In addition, the adding a contact to Multiple Groups from the Group tab in the Contact Detail View feature has returned from ACT! Classic.

Sales Opportunity Tracking:  ACT! 2005 brought us Opportunity View to allow users to view the opportunities for all their contacts in a single window.  The Opportunity View allows you to filter the opportunities in a variety of ways.  The new Sales Opportunity function also allowed users to include multiple products in a single opportunity and let you customize eight user fields to track additional data on a deal.  Unfortunately, you could not set those user fields to anything other than text, nor could you manage a drop-down list for any of those fields. 

ACT! 2006 PFW adds the ability to customize the type of information that goes into those fields; for example, you might want to designate that a field will hold a currency or date value.  You can also make the eight opportunity fields mandatory, and use drop-down lists to ensure data accuracy.

One-click Export to Excel:  ACT! 2005 brought us the one-click export to Excel.  This is available to quickly export contacts by clicking on an icon in the Contact List View.  Or, you can export Sales Opportunities to Excel which would also create Pivot Tables in Excel.   The only downside is that you could not remove that function for Standard Users.  This meant that a Standard user could dump the entire database to Excel and take your valuable company asset – your contacts – out the door.  With ACT! 2006 you have the ability to restrict that function by user. 

Custom User Permissions:  ACT! 2005 introduced 2 new levels of Users: Restricted and Manager.  This allows companies to better manage which users could perform certain functions in the database. 

ACT! 2006 PFW takes it one step further by allowing the Administrator to customize what permissions a User has in several key areas, such as the Export to Excel Feature.  Other areas of custom permission settings include the ability for a User to delete Contacts, Companies, Groups, Opportunities and Activities Series that he/she created; perform administrative tasks on remote databases; sync the ACT! database to a hand-held device, like a Palm; and perform accounting link tasks

Hierarchical Tree Views:  ACT! 2005 introduced the ability to have up to 15 levels of Sub-Groups, from the ACT! Classic world of 2 levels.  In the Group List view, if you were viewing both Groups and Sub-Groups, ACT! would sort that list alphabetically by the Group or Sub-Group name.  And while you could go to a Group and see a list of all the Sub-Groups under that Group in the Sub-Groups Window, you could not see a true hierarchy of your Group structure, with all the Sub-Groups visible. 

ACT! 2006 re-introduced the Tree view of Groups so that you can click on a plus sign in front of a Group and see a list of all the Sub-Groups underneath and so on, through all 15 levels. 

Limited Contact Access:  ACT! 2005 PFW introduced the ability to limit the access to a Contact record by User or Teams. This meant that you could control which Users had access to which contacts.  Problem was, you had to set the Access one contact at a time.

ACT! 2006 PFW allows you to set the contact access for multiple contacts at once.  For example, you can now perform a Lookup of all Contacts in a particular Territory and change the contact access to a specific User and/or Team for that entire lookup. You can also now perform a Lookup of Contacts by their assigned access, as well as Lookup which Users or Teams have been granted Access to Contacts.

Database Synchronization:  ACT! 2005 came with a whole new, reliable and scalable sync function.  The new sync function is easy to setup and maintain.  However, there were a few pesky design issues that were corrected in ACT! 2006.

ACT! 2005 made use of a Remote Database Expiration.  The idea was that if a remote user did not synchronize within a certain timeframe, the Remote Database could no longer sync with the Main database.  While theoretically a good idea, the upper limit was 90 days, and if a user just forgot to sync before the expiration, then that remote database could never sync again.  

ACT! 2006 PFW, you can now set the Expiration as high as 365 days and even after a remote database expires, you can still send one last sync to the main database.  You can also set a remote database to synchronize automatically to further reduce the chance that a remote database will expire.

In the ACT! Classic sync model, the only thing to sync was the data itself.  Supplemental files such as attachments, templates, layouts, queries, reports, labels, and envelopes were not included as part of the synchronization process.  This meant that if you updated any of those items on the main database, the remote sync user would not get them through the synchronization process.   

With ACT! 2005, those supplemental files were included as part of what we call the “Data Store.”  This meant that anything and everything in the attachments, backup, layouts, queries, reports or templates folders, would sync out to all remote users.  The issue with attachments was that although you could limit which contacts were sent to a remote sync user through the sync set, all attachments for all contacts in the database would sync, even if a user did not have access to that contact. Even worse this could make the sync process very slow.

ACT! 2006, attachments will only sync to a remote database for those contacts defined in the sync set for that database. 

ACT! 2006 Premium for WorkGroups Administration Functions:  ACT! will continue to serve the 5-10 user market segment with its ACT! 2006 Standard product, but the Premium for WorkGroups product family is really designed to meet the needs of larger organizations, with the ability to support up to (and in some cases well over) 50 concurrent users.

Silent Install:  In most organizations users do not always have sufficient permissions to install software, and can mean that IT controls application installation remotely.  While ACT! 2006 PFW still requires Administrative level permissions on the machine to install the program, a user with Non-Administrative level permissions can now run the application on their workstation after an Administrator installs ACT!.

With the launch of ACT! 2006 PFW, the IT staff can set up ACT! using what is known as a “Silent Install.”  Silent installations run without any user input and with no indication to the user that an installation is occurring. 

ACT! Scheduler: ACT! 2006 PFW, you can use the ACT! Scheduler to setup an automated backup of your ACT! databases, including Remote Sync databases.  This insures that your ACT! database, and all of the associated supplemental files, including Attachments, Backups, Layouts, Queries, Reports and Templates, will be backed up regularly without having to rely on an administrative user to manually backup the database. 

Citrix and Terminal Services Support: In an effort to reduce IT support costs, companies are using Terminal Services or Citrix solutions in their IT environment.  When a user runs an application on a Citrix or Windows Terminal Server, the application is installed only on the server and all of the application execution takes place on the server. Using Citrix or Terminal Services, companies can make sure that all Users are on the most current versions of an application because the software is installed only once on a server, rather than on every workstation throughout the organization. This model reduces the costs and challenges of updating user machines, especially for remotely located workstations or branch offices.

ACT! 2006 is the first version of ACT! to be officially supported in a Citrix or Terminal Services environment.

Email Charlie at ckemmerer@mcginc.com for a FREE copy of the "Top Ten Questions to Ask Your CRM Vendor" white paper.

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