Making Sage-ACT! better , little by little

Helping to retain ACT! as the CRM of choice by customers over the years has been a design focus on ease of use and logical simplicity. Moving about the ACT! views in daily use is a far better experience  than many of the competing and often more expensive CRM products. You will often hear people comment, “ ACT! does what you expect it to do”.  That quality isn’t to be underestimated in maintaining ACT! user loyalty in a competitive world of increasing CRM choices.

The smooth continuity of navigation for instance, is typically illustrated by the back and forward buttons accessed from the toolbar. They readily allow moving back and forward through previous views and look-ups in ACT! avoiding the need to ‘peck-n-hunt’ through cascading menus trying to re-create a recent view or look-up. You do miss the ease of use that provides when you try other CRM software that lacks that feature. 

However there are more task specific functions that aren’t quite within reach of ACT!’s standard toolkit. These operations require a less direct approach or alternative work-around to complete and can be a source of frustration with users, in that they aren’t more easily performed.

Xact Software as an ACT! add-on developer focuses on building applications for ACT! that improve workflow, connecting ACT! to other office software such as accounting or providing charting tools that allow wider reach for ACT! so it becomes an integral part of office process.  Using ACT! every day in our own business, we are alert to those minor irritations that sometimes we feel could be handled a little better than they are. So from time to time in assisting the ACT! community, Xact Software provides free utilities through our site www.freeactaddons.com  to help overcome those little ‘I wish I could do this in ACT!’ moments that users experience.

For September we have released the following free ACT! addons at www.freeactaddons.com :

1. Bulk Opportunity Status Update – a plugin that is accessible from the Tools menu can be applied to a lookup of ACT! opportunities saving the need to update opportunity status one at a time.
2. Activity ID/Status – Using the ACT! activity Location field, this plugin displays the data from the Contact  ID/Status field in the Task List for easy identification of important customers or conditions
3. Edit Append – complements the bulk update capability for ACT! fields, so now you can add data to an existing field without removing the current data. Readily accessible from the ACT! Edit menu.
   
     

Watch out for more  free utilities just  follow us on Twitter  www.twitter.com/xactsoftware