Quote from David, 'ACT! only needs your standard server and will even work peer to peer. Jason - There's always some consultancy in order to make things work properly and get a return on your investment!

Specifially its handling of in body images, copied and pasted html (from a website) and formatting changes as the emails pass through Outlook. We restored an old database once, and it was unusable as Act tried to open 10,000 plus reminders that had been triggered in the mean time. Our main problem with Act has been that its slower than expected and has odd problems. Most have switched to just using Outlook. With annual upgrades of $100, an the yearly promise that its faster and better every year, I have started encouraging users to use anything else. I have been supporting Act for six years and as far as I can tell Act is a cut rate product at a cut rate price. Again, a qualified and experienced ACT! consultant would be able to sort this out in a few hours, and show you many functions which make it the most popular contact database in the world. It records all emails sent and received against the associated Contact record. Jason8297 - The latest version of ACT! is very tightly integrated with outlook for sending/receiving emails. Up until about 10 months ago I was also Marketing Manager (in addition to the IT job) and for those 5 years I found ACT to be an integral part of my groups daily routine. I have not implemented the Synchronization features only because we haven't had the need. We are still running an old version due to the cost to upgrade, but even the old version is still performing quite well. Once you get a few tasks down such as changing information in large groups all at once, exporting information out in formats that can be used for mass mailers in other programs such as MS Office, using the Query helper and using Advanced Query Operators, it becomes a much more efficient tool. Our outside Sales team remotes into the server while they are on the road and run it from there with no problem as well. Of course, our user number is much lower than some of you so that could be a factor. That has always fixed our problems with it being slow. (File ->Administrator -> Database Maintenance) That will lock out all the users for a couple of minutes while it goes through and compresses and reindexes itself. When my users report it is running slow I simply go in as the Administrator of ACT and run maintenance on it. The biggest single complaint I hear about ACT is that it runs slow at times. I customize the page periodically to fit our needs and have found that very easy to do. We have approx 12,000 contacts in one database, which is on the server and shared among approx 25 - 30 users. We have had ACT in place for 6 years and it is still working well for us.

Act by sage software