Sage Unveils New ACT With 40-Plus Add-Ons

Sage Software introduced the latest version of ACT, ACT by Sage 2007, last week. It includes ACT 9.0, ACT by Sage Premium for Workgroups 2007 9.0, ACT by Sage Premium for Web 2007 9.0 and ACT for Palm OS 2.0. Sage has also introduced more than 40 new add-on modules for the ACT by Sage 2007 9.0 contact and customer management product family.

What Is New

New and updated ACT 2007 features include direct integration with Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Outlook and field-level data security, as well as new productivity and administration tools. The cumulative effect of these developments, said Larry Ritter, vice president of ACT product management, is a consistent customer experience both online and offline. "Whether users are working on Windows or through the Web, they have the same experience without any loss of functionality," he told CRM Buyer.

The direct integration with Outlook is the biggest change, allowing ACT users to open e-mail from Outlook. Users can also populate e-mail addresses and create an ACT history from Outlook automatically when Outlook calendar synchronization occurs, even when the database is not open.

New features that enhance user productivity include split-panel note preview, which allows a user to view the entire contents of a contact, group or company note while scrolling for another note; the ability to specify which fields are linked between contact and company records; the ability to identify the date of the last e-mail sent from contact detail view; and advanced keyword search.

New security features include password expiration, password complexity and password reuse options. Field-level security restricts access by a user or team, and grants read-only access or no access to certain fields. Users can also change security access to notes, history and opportunities en masse.

Add-On Functionality

Released separately, the new add-on products range from communications, sales , marketing , mapping, help desk, synchronization, administrative and productivity functions. A few examples include the following:

• Activator Automated Sales Assistant by Mastermind Software -- marketing and sales process automation enhancements for ACT including predefined sales action plans and document templates;
• CompanionLink Express by CompanionLink Software, which synchronizes ACT contact data with PDAs and smartphones;
• IOC Campaign by Information Optics, which generates follow-up e-mails, faxes, and letters to prospects and customers from the ACT database;
• MigrateAdmin by ASDS Computer Company, which incorporates GoldMine data directly into ACT;
• TopLine Dash Manager by TopLine Results Corporation, which centralizes key business intelligence; and
• Task List Plus by Durkin Computing, an ACT Task List view feature that reassigns multiple activities and performs calculations.