Others say...

"AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE !"
This is the worst written piece of software in creation. It would get 0 stars if it were an option. I develop software for a living, and needed this for a business, so I dug into it deep. What an overweight piece of junk ! The folks at SAGE, need to get over themselves...this is just contact management stuff...a glorified address book. This isn't missile defense software or anything...there's no need for this to take up 50mb RAM and 100's of MB hard drive space, and take 5 minutes for it to load on a Pentium 4 3GHZ ! It's cumbersome, super buggy, the documentation sucks, the tech support is good for only 30 days, and you'll be on hold for 29 of them.
Don't even think of importing data from a text file or Excel...it is so poorly documented and buggy, that you may as well get temps to key it in for you. And multi user support? More like multi headache...they have a convoluted synchronization process like Lotus Notes...more undocumented complexty...oh by the way, the whole thing requires a run time of MS SQL Server...which will be sure to crash your system occasionally.
At my job, I had to evaluate some timesheet software for a department of about 30 people..one of them is called Timesheets, and it's made by the same company - SAGE .... After seeing a quick demo, I saw so many things that reminded me of this POS that I nicely told the Sage Sales Rep that they're out of the running, through no fault of the person, but b/c the software is so bad.
DO YOURSELF A FAVOR - don't buy this or any other version from this company...write something quick in MS Access... pay someone...save yourself the time and aggravation that I went through.



"2006 ACT"
Do not spend a penny on this software (If you can call it software) If 2006 ACT is running, you cannot possibly run anything else. This software boggs everything down and renders you computer basically useless. The software on the surface looks great, however it is impossible to use. STAY AWAY!!

"One star only because zero stars isn't an option"
Could not agree more w/ the naysayers. While speed isn't an issue everything else is. Backed up the db - all my phone numbers disappeared. Their email - JOKE. Initially, once in awhile I would open it up and my folders (other than the standard ones) were gone and all the others were empty. Closing email and restarting it seemed to take care of the problem. Then one day, gone never to return. Switched to using Outlook thru Act and same thing. Worked intially, now all my email is gone except when I go into Outlook itself - thankfully they're still there. The PDA version.... another boondoggle. When I clear an appointment it freezes. Continuously. When I reset the Palm the appointment is properly cleared but then when I sync, sometimes that gets updated in the desktop, sometimes not. I understand the rush to market and subsequent bug fixes but this is over the top. My suggestion is to work a paper system before buying this piece of... you get the idea.

"Does not integrate with Outlook as Advertised"
I upgraded from ACT! 2006 to ACT! 2007 because of an email that I recieved from ACT touting the new benefits of ACT's integration with Microsoft Outlook.

I STILL am NOT ABLE to send an email from ACT! using pop3 without Outlook being open and running in the backround. The send/recieve button in ACT only ques my message to be sent when Outlook is open and then the send/recieve function within Outlook must be triggered manually or by the auto send /recieve function.

This was a problem with ACT! 2005/2006 and they have documented it in their knowledge base and tech support suggest what they call a "work arround" to the problem. This "work around" is actually leaving an outlook window open all the time in the backround and setting Outlooks automatic send/reciev to a short time interval.

Who wants to have to be working in both programs? Where Does ACT! get the nerve to send out an email to existing customers bragging about their great new integration with Outlook. This is an old problem. FIX IT.

"If you are a Sys Admin Beware!"
This review is for the Sys admins:
ACT installs Microsoft MSDE (free version of SQL) for each computer running ACT. The problem with this is if you install the centralized database on a server and want to backup the SQL Instance, it wont let you! You cannot use the SQL Enterprise Manager to open the instance. The only user that is allowed access to the instance is the "sa" user. ACT does not want anyone to view their tables unless you buy a special program from them!

Its a nightmare backing up ACT. You cant copy and paste the database from one computer to another. When you create a new database in ACT, ACT stores something in the SQL instance. So if you copy the ACT db to another computer and click File -> Open Database, and choose the ACT db, it will give an error. I am not sure if there is an automated way to backup ACT but I hope there is.

BEWARE!