applications software

ACT! 6.0 Contact Manager

Rating:

By Joel Shore

May 9, 2003

ACT! 6.0 is program I very badly wanted to love. Now in its sixth generation, ACT! is the product most-often mentioned when the topic of contact-management software comes up.

Full of improvements in its overall fit and finish, and blessed with a bevy of new features, the overall experience, alas, is one of long-standing shortcomings remaining unaddressed. And that’s truly too bad, because at its core, ACT! is still king of the mountain at handling contacts—for individual users. Unfortunately, ACT! 6.0 seems completely unaware of today’s geographically scattered, wireless employees who work via the Web.

New Features

ACT! 6.0 retains its general look, but screens have been tweaked for a more sophisticated appearance. As always, you can move fields (phone numbers, addresses, etc.) around the screen and add additional ones. Outlook has never been able to do that (and that won’t change in Office 2003).

Here’s some of what’s new in ACT! 6.0:

• Redesigned e-mail with 10 HTML templates

• Improved integration with Outlook

• Ability to access, view, and editor documents from within any contact record

• Activity lookup to tap inactive prospects

• Pop-up calendar that provides event detail

• Advanced alarms with increased detail

• View Web sites from within ACT!

• Synchronize ACT! and Outlook calendars

• Annual Event field type for birthdays, anniversaries, expiration dates, etc.

The Look, The Feel

Many products have made a point of adopting the look of Microsoft’s Outlook e-mail and calendaring program, mainly the vertical navigation bar at the left side of the screen. ACT! 6.0 is not different. But hold on. Outlook 2003, due in late summer 2003, is all new, completely redesigned, and looks very different from what we’re used to. Emulate older versions of Outlook and you emulate the past. (Of course, if you emulate, you are, by definition, a follower, not a leader, but that’s another story.) See for yourself:

 

é	The main contact screen in ACT! 6.0 is easy on the eyes  and adopts the familiar "Outlook Bar," look; the vertical navigation area to the left of the screen.
ê	Microsoft Outlook 2003 sports an all-new design that fits a whopping 40% more into the same screen space as prior versions. The Outlook Bar has been completely redesigned, eliminating space-wasting icons.

Great Contact Management

You’d expect a contact manager to be superb at handling contacts. ACT! 6.0 does not disappoint. You can add fields, define the field entry order, and move fields around on the screen. You can sort, group, and find contacts in many ways, limited only by your imagination. You can group contact (all employees for one company, for example) and then break that group into sub-groups (say, regional offices).

You can link files (a PowerPoint presentation or a Word document, for example) to contacts. Beware though, these are just pointers to where that file resides; it’s not included in your ACT! database and won’t be sent to any other with whom you synchronize contacts. That’s pretty poor. If a file resides on a server, it should be accessible by anyone, anywhere, and at any time, so long as one has the access rights to do so.

Coming Up Short

ACT! is most often compared with GoldMine. Both products compete in the same price bracket and for the same mid-level user. While this new version of ACT! is much cleaner looking than prior incarnations, it just doesn’t measure up to GoldMine in the area of realtime workgroup collaboration.

A little history. Developed in 1986, ACT! for DOS was designed for individual users. Following the 1990 release of Microsoft Windows 3.0, ACT! for Windows arrived in 1992. Though the costs of PC-based networking had already started to drop, ACT! remained a product for the individual. By contrast, GoldMine, was created by someone who had worked for Banyan, the now-defunct networking company. Given that background, GoldMine was conceived from the ground up for use in a networked environment, by simultaneous multiple users. ACT! has been taken to task over the years for not catching up. When it comes to multiuser operation, it still lags far behind.

There’s really very little in the ACT! User’s Guide that discusses the concept of sharing contact information in real time. Ten pages of the manual—a complete chapter, in fact—is devoted to synchronizing users’ databases with each other, an outdated concept that can be unwieldy and difficult to keep straight. (Did I sync with Patrick? And did Patrick sync with Stephanie? And on and on.)

Oddly, the manual does mention the far superior idea of sharing data via a multiuser database, and refers the reader to another place in the manual (page 95), where a scant two pages is devoted to the concept. If you choose to go for the multiuser database, be sure that all users upgrade to version 6.0. That’s because 5.0 and 6.0 users cannot share the same database.

And then there’s this, taken directly from the ACT! tech support Web site: "We neither support nor recommend accessing ACT! databases over dial-up connections, virtual private networks (VPNs), or wide area networks (WANs)." I agree that dial-up is undesirable, but only because it’s slow. But a VPN or a WAN? These are modern, high-speed, secure, means of communications. Is this a deliberate repudiation of the technologies on which today’s business rely, or could it perhaps be an admission that it was just too hard do? Either way, it’s unacceptable.

Compared with the highly network-savvy GoldMine, it’s a real shame to see that ACT! has made so little progress into the age of collaborative computing.

Microsoft, with its SharePoint Services platform running on Windows Server 2003, is bringing workgroup computing and worldwide sharing of documents to a new level of sophistication and simplicity. While ACT! is busy warning users of all the things it’s not capable of doing, Microsoft is installing the plumbing that allows any software product to be Web-centric.

E-Mail Doesn’t Quite Deliver

Creating e-mail within ACT! 6.0 is a curious experience. I think it’s fair to say that the vast majority of knowledge workers today create their e-mail using Microsoft Outlook. A lesser (though still significant) number uses e-mail clients such as Lotus Notes, Novell GroupWise, or Eudora.

When you use ACT!, it becomes its own e-mail client. Unlike Outlook, which seamlessly uses Word for composing messages, ACT! pops-up its own proprietary word processor—and in a separate window. I’m not sure why that is, but I am sure that I don’t want two word processors on my system, thank you. Viewing mail is done in a pop-up window; that shouldn’t be necessary.

Though the line between ACT! and Outlook are miles away from being seamless, the relationship between the two programs is improved. When using Outlook, you can access your ACT! contact database. It’s a good thing, too. That’s because the ACT! e-mail function can’t filter out spam or have dozens of user-defined mail-handling rules the way Outlook can.

There are other problems, too. The 6.0.3 update is not just a compendium of bug fixes. According the included readme file, nine new features are included, in addition to performance improvements. Why this many new features in what is essentially a patch? It’s a clear indication to me that 6.0 shipped long before it was finished and that 6.0.3 includes what never made it into the cardboard box.

And how about this: "When sending e-mail from Microsoft Outlook using your ACT! database as an address book, Microsoft Word cannot be used as the e-mail editor." This is a direct quote from the 6.0.3 readme file.

Furthermore, I must question a specific design decision. The ACT! tech support Web site discusses the problem "Cannot Create New, Reply, or Send e-mail After Updating to ACT! 6.0.3.x."

It turns out that the format for e-mail signatures introduced in version 6.0 has already been changed. It now allows multiple signatures. Great idea. But why now? Clearly, the people behind this program don’t (or can’t) think very far ahead. For a downloadable update to render a format in the just-released major new version obsolete is a monumental blunder. And the workaround is laughable: you are recommended to create an additional signature, one that might contain just a space or a period. That’s outright amateur-league. And if that fix doesn’t work, if you are "unable to add a signature to ACT!, you will need to edit the system registry." Is that something an end-user should do? Not a chance. That’s flat-out unacceptable in a product now in it’s sixth generation. It’s a mess.

End of the Line?

ACT! has a long heritage of excellence as a contact manager, and ACT! 6.0 succeeds in extending that track record. You can store lots of information about each of your customers, set reminders, link documents, and more. But as a long-awaited major update to a cherished business tool, I’m sorry to say that ACT! 6.0 is a failure.

This once great platform is so ignorant of Web-based, realtime sharing of contacts, files, appointments, and tasks, it makes one wonder what’s planned for version 7.0—or if the developers should even bother. Based on what is present in—and missing from—version 6.0, one must wonder if this company is even capable of developing such a product. Doing so would likely require throwing away much of the current code.

Considering the tone of this review, I must step away from my posture of impartiality in the interest of fairness and full disclosure. I am a longtime user of ACT! and wrote glowing reviews of prior versions. The folks at ACT! with whom I’ve had contact since the early 1990s are delightful, conscientious, dedicated people.

If there is to be a version 7, it had better allow users in New York, Tokyo, Paris, and on ships at sea to share all and see all, and do it in real time, with Web-based databases that eliminate the archaic practice of user file synchronization. Sad to say, ACT! 6.0 is poorly executed product that is way, way behind the times. <