Late last year, I came to this company as a consultant in information technology and saw a complete disaster built around ACT 5.0 on a peer to peer network. One workstation fed data to three others, and a fourth operated through email synchronizations out in the field. After putting a dedicated and capable server (Dual P3-600, 1G RAM, 18G RAID array) together as a host for the ACT data files and synchronization software, we thought we had it licked. Unfortunately, we should have stopped there. E-mail based synchronization was flaky due to a slightly unreliable ISP.

We then identified an interest in managing QuickBooks Pro and ACT together, which was offered by ACT 6.0. So, when a phonecall came from Interact offering us full version licenses at the upgrade price, we jumped on it, hoping for improvements in the synchronization process and the ability to extend ACT's functionality to other software and devices, such as a considered deployment of Palm OS devices to our sales force. Once we got ACT 6.0 at the office, we were updated and running with it within a week.

Then the trouble started. Synchronization fell even further into a pit, with lost contacts, appointments that refused to reschedule across synchronization, and a complete breakdown of the email software built into ACT. They had seperated the Internet e-mail tool from the main program in a way that seemed to make no sense, spawning a new window while still interrupting the main thread of the ACT database. If your email client hung for some reason, the entire application would stall and require a process kill. And if your email program has a problem finding the hostname to one of your mail servers, forget it. It'll hang.

Accessing the database across our LAN became intolerably slow under ACT 6. Our database, with 4500 contacts, would take a half second to a second or more simply to page through the contacts. Under ACT 5, this is practically instantaneous. Loading the calendar view with only 5 users scheduled, and filtered to only display two, took between 15 and 30 seconds. Under ACT 5, one to two seconds, tops.

We have one of the ACT Advantage support memberships, and even had an ACT certified professional who seemed very knowledgeable look at our setup. He went over every inch of our network and ACT configuration, and saw nothing wrong with anything I had done. The ACT Advantage people told me to install Outlook on the server on the off chance that might work. Why should I need to use a third-party application to make ACT work? If the built-in Internet E-mail option for synchronization is unreliable, why include it for something as important as this?

The "Library" tab was an absolute joke. We could not resize images displayed in it that had been scanned using our sheetfed desktop scanners, and viewing a contact with this tab took up to a minute. It simply boggled the mind how much this "feature" wasn't.

Our largest initial annoyance was the fact our scanners could no longer scan directly into the ACT application. Under ACT 5.0, the scanner functioned simply. View the contact you wanted to attach a document to, feed the document through the scanner, and done. Attached as a note to the contact. Under ACT 6 this broke, and ACT claimed it was a third-party application that they did not support. We had only a very basic program, PaperPort, that managed this interface. It seems to simply use the drag-and-drop functionality inherent to Windows to perform this task. Under ACT 6, this was broken, but of course can be worked around by spending two hundred dollars on an "Add-In"...

In general, ACT 6 felt like a very shoddy product. It felt for all intents and purposes like someone had taken the ACT 5 codebase and decided to split it up into smaller components in order to facilitate the selling of even more Interact and third-party applications and "Add-ins" to increase revenue.

We returned it. It really is not worth the risk.

"First time user is amazed"
Wisely hired a pro (developer) to install and modify this to work exactly the way I want to monitor the performance of the sales person. That way it will make reports the way we want them, and even upload the recent contact notes to a webpage like so other managers can see progress. With a fax modem card this even dials the phone on command while automatically recording the date of the call for progress reports. Now we know whether or not the contract sales people are really putting in the hours, etc. Very cool.

"OK for database novices"
I administer and use ACT at our 10 employee company. They used ACT before I came to the company so I am not to blame for choosing it as a solution. The program is built from Access so if you might be better off just going with that program. There is a steeper learning curve but you will not be slowed down by features you wont use.
ACT does provide features you might want connected to your contact DB, like email and sales tools. If you choose to go with this almost turnkey solution understand that the program will probably lock up regularly if more than one user connects to it. And it is slow. But I would recommend for a single user without database experience.

"New Features Helpful but Very Unstable"
I'm a big ACT! fan as I've been using it for almost 10 years. I haven't come across anything that is as powerful for the price. I was initially excited to see some of the advertized features in version 6.0 because they speed up my work flow. But unfortunately, when I use the look-up and sorting features ACT crashes at least every other try. I'm using Windows NT and there are 4 other users sharing the database (and 1K contacts) but this is considered an acceptable operating environment for this program (and it's the same configuration as I had using 5.0). The feature allowing attachment of documents to a record is also useful but it has bugs, often locking up my computer or pausing for 1-2 minutes to open a simple Word document. If you're not in a rush, wait until version 6.1 or later is released in hopes that the bugs get worked out.

"Excellent upgrade"
Been using ACT! since 1991; this is an effective and incremental upgrade. A good deal of the development effort apparently went into the e-mail functionality, which allows you to create and send graphical (HTML) e-mail. I've already used a template to create a newsletter for my business and mail it out to about a hundred clients, personalized with their name, etc.

Another new feature is the library tab, which allows you to display a graphics file (or MS Word, Excel, or Adobe Acrobat file) alongside a contact record. The Outlook integration allows you to attach an e-mail received in Outlook against an ACT! record, to provide an inbound and outbound record of communications with contacts.

Several new reports, a few new lookup features, including one that lets you search for contacts that you haven't done anything with in a while. For me, having a more robust e-mail client inside ACT! made the purchase worthwhile.

It's always been the favorite of most salespeople who've used it because it's well-designed, easy to learn, and for the price, a phenomenal deal. There's nothing else out there like it.