The latest incarnation of Sage's popular ACT! sales and marketing software was released in September 2009. So what can its 3 million loyal users expect? Well, quite a lot, actually. This is much more than just an incremental release with a bit of added functionality and a few bug fixes. This is a radical overhaul that brings a fresh new look and a host of new tools for the marketeers to use.  

Installation

The installation and registration has now been simplified, and you can now select either a "Typical" or a "Custom" install. Thankfully, you now also have the option to select the region and currency you wish to use, although this is then hard coded and cannot be changed later.

New Welcome Page

The first noticeable difference is the new look. When you first fire up ACT! 2010 (pronounced "twenty-ten" we are assured) you are rewarded with a "Welcome Page" with pretty green swirly bits to make you feel happier and to remind you of other pieces of Sage software that you might have on your computer.

The same page has lots of potentially useful shortcuts to help items, web sites, the PDF manual, or to various parts of the program set up. These are grouped into categories such as Getting Started, How Do I, What's New in ACT! 2010, Customisation, Support and Services, and ACT! news.   We also have new "Big Easy" buttons (pleased to see that the Sage marketing department have been gainfully employed dreaming that one up) to the main functions, and a completely redesigned navigation bar, the "NavBar"  on the left hand side.  

New NavBar

The redesigned "NavBar" on the left of the screen now contains not only shortcut icons to Contacts, Groups Companies etc, as before, but also a "related tasks" section that shows links to things you might want to do next. These suggestions change depending which screen you are viewing. The NavBar can also be minimised to save screen space if you are running ACT! on a low resolution  monitor such as an ultra-portable or netbook. I've been running it on a netbook with a 1024 x 600 resolution and it's perfectly usable if a little cramped.  

One key redesign feature also appears in the ever-present NavBar, and that's Lookups. Lookups are the what people normally do to find things in ACT! The Lookup window is now always present and a nice touch is that the default option is that a field "Contains" whatever you're looking for rather than the regular "Starts With".   The NavBar is also customisable so you can add and remove icons and also change their order.  

In real life, most users will just want to get straight into their data rather than peruse the delights of the Welcome page and fortunately you can define whether you want the first screen to be the Welcome screen, Contacts, Contact List or Dashboard view.  

When you reach the regular Contact Detail view a few other changes become apparent. Firstly, the Back button has gone. This used to allow you to go back to the previous page you were looking at.. This will either be a source of irritation if you used the function or of no matter if you were one of the majority who I suspect never knew it existed in the first place.   Anyway, to compensate there are two new tabs to explore, the first one of which is "Web Info".  

Web Info  

The Web Info tab displays web pages that are linked to the Contact (or Company)record you are on.   By default these are, Contact's Website, Facebook, Google Driving Directions, Google Maps, Google News Search, Google Search, LinkedIn, Plaxo, and Weather, though perhaps surprisingly, not Twitter. However the links to the various sites can be customised, and others can be added although you may need help from a Sage Business Partner to set this up.   Now, some of these links work better than others, and their success depends to a large extent on how the visited sites allow queries from external sources. The "information" links to Google maps and the like work extremely well, others, such as LinkedIn show a list of people with the same name as your contact from which to choose, irrespective of their geographic location. Even if you can pick the right "John Smith" on this occasion, this specific link is lost the next time you select the same contact record in ACT!   Whilst this is an interesting step into the world of relevant on-line information, its value will depend on the type of information your business needs and what's available out there. The other limitation is that you can't query the Web Info or do lookups based on it, nor can you harvest data gleaned, however it's a good first attempt at linking dynamic information on the internet to specific companies or contacts in your database.  

Marketing Results  

The other new tab is "Marketing Results". This is part of the new ACT! E-marketing functionality that is now built in to the software. ACT! E-marketing is something of a joint venture between Sage and Swiftpage, an American e-mail bureau that has provided an add-on commercial email marketing function for ACT! (and other databases) for a number of years.

This functionality now comes pre-installed. If you want to use these features you have to follow a wizard which quickly allows you to create an account with Swiftpage. Swiftpage is a subscription service costing between £ 9.95 and £39.95 + vat per month depending on the number of e-mails per day you might want to send and the level of reporting and ACT! integration you need. The good news is that you can have a free trial for a month and send 50 emails per day to see if this is for you before signing up for one of the pay services.  

ACT! E-marketing allows you to design personalised professional html emails, with the usual opt-out, forward to a friend, link to your web-site options. You then select the ACT! contacts you wish to receive your marketing message, select when you want it to go and ...that's it. It all happens automatically, without your email server grinding to a halt, as all the emails go from the Swiftpage servers, not yours.

However the best bit is yet to come. After the emails are sent you can get a wide range of feedback information such as the number of opens, who linked to your web site etc. Even better, this information is linked back into ACT! so you can categorise your contacts by their response and even create a call list based on how hot, medium or cold was their response.  

You can also subscribe to advanced services such as "Drip-Marketing", where you can set up a series of related emails, all scheduled to go out in a sequence, and with different emails going out depending on the response to the last one. ACT! E-mail Marketing is an extremely powerful marketing tool in the right hands, and I would strongly recommend getting a Swiftpage Certified Consultant on board to help set this up, at least in the first instance.  

iCal and vCards  

Another important addition to ACT! 2010 is the ability to generate iCal and vCard attachments to go out with emails. The use of iCal attachments allows ACT! users to share calendar items (activities) with non-ACT! users, who can then incorporate the information into Microsoft® Outlook® and other compatible software, such as Gmail™, Apple®iCal®, Windows Live™, Facebook™, Groupwise® and Lotus Notes®. You can also create an ACT! activity when you accept a meeting from an iCal meeting request from Outlook.  

With vCard you can send name and address details to someone using another application such as Outlook and they can incorporate the data without having to cut and paste.  

Customisable Opportunities  

The sales opportunities area of ACT! is where you keep tabs on potential business that you are expecting to win and on the business you have already won or lost. This allows you to generate a wealth of sales pipeline information to monitor and control your business. 

The Opportunities section of ACT! has been completely restructured so that instead of being a sub-section of a Contact or Company  record it now has equal prominence. Along with the redesign comes the ability to be able to radically customise almost every component to match the way your business works, something that many users have been requesting for a long time. So, if you want to see the gross profit for a Sales Opportunity as you add items; no problem. Selling training courses rather than Widgits, just rename the column header from "Product Name" to "Course Name". The whole screen layout for the Opportunities section is now customisable, like the Contact or Company screen, so there's huge potential for tailoring the appearance to the way you want it.   To be fair, existing ACT! users might take a while to get their heads around the new format, but will eventually understand what they are looking at.  

Reports 

I once made the comment that ACT! reports were designed by witchcraft, and in this version the reports themselves have not changed. Ten new ones have now been added to provide more options reporting on the sales pipeline including Opportunities by process and status, and Won Opportunities. More radically, reports now get a whole window to themselves. Here you can see all of the reports available and you can check which ones are your favourites and they are then added to your Favourite Reports list for easy access. You can also edit the description of each report to better explain what it does if you wish.   It is expected that the ACT! report engine is to be replaced within the next year or so, and that will be a good thing when it happens. 

Dashboards 

Dashboards are the new kid on the block in the ACT! reporting world producing flashy graphs and charts giving you snapshot information of your Sales Opportunities or Activities.   There's a new "Data Chart Dashboard Component" (great name, guys) in ACT! 2010, which allows access to something of a hotchpotch of assorted information including Contacts by Country and Department and Recently Created and Edited Contacts. There's also a Contact History Count by History Type, which does pretty much what it says, but is still not the filterable equivalent of the Activities dashboards that is much needed to extract useful information out of ACT! History.  It's a great pity they didn't go the extra nine yards to finish this one off.  Once more, it is possible to edit the xml files to change these dashboards but only computer geeks or warlocks need apply. 

For larger organisations the ACT! Administrative Dashboard will be a bonus allowing the administrator to see user information such as logon status and database sync status.  

Synchronisation Setup 

Setting up multiple synchronised databases has been a chore as they could only be done one at a time. Now you can do up to 50 at once. Not a benefit that the average user will notice, but one that the ACT! administrator will much appreciate.  

Conclusion 

Overall, this is a significant development in the 22 year history of ACT! This popular sales and marketing toolbox has now got some new tools including early-stage business / information / social networking links and access to the incredibly powerful ACT! E-mail Marketing tool. The only downside is the increased learning curve that users will have to transcend if they are not going to miss out on the many sales and marketing benefits that ACT! can provide. More Information

For more information, visit www.bigbluemarketing.co.uk