When you make a telephone query to a national company and provide your name and postcode, you expect the person handling the call to have rapid access to every detail of your account. It's the way business works today and we take instant customer service for granted, along with the attendant curses of call queues and mind-numbingly tedious hold music.

The programs that make all this possible fall into the category of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, and the most sophisticated examples tie in with back-end computer systems used elsewhere within a company and permit call handlers to actually get things done rather than merely log calls and record data.

At the other extreme from this process-centric model are simpler data-based systems that offer contact management with e-mail facilities, plus a range of sales and marketing tools. ACT! 2007 (we'll drop the gimmicky spelling from now on) is positioned firmly at the contact management end of this spectrum.

It logs all calls to customers and clients, synchronises with Palm OS and Pocket PC hand-helds, keeps a history of all client communications and is supplied with 40 customisable reports. The usual sales management tools are there, including the ability to schedule calls, meetings and events as part of a co-ordinated marketing campaign.

Unlike sophisticated CRM systems, which tend to be bespoke designs, Act comes in a retail box and can be installed on any stand-alone or networked PC. The minimum system requirements call for a 600MHz Pentium processor and 512MB of RAM, but if that's all you've got, forget it.

Installing Act is like attaching lead boots to a PC, and even on a machine with far more processing power and 1GB of RAM the performance penalty is evident. It's not just Act that performs sluggishly; so do Word, Excel and Outlook once they've been tied to it.

Part of the problem is Act's dependence on SQL Server 2005 for data storage facilities, and on .NET Framework 2.0 for automation tools and plug-ins. Both of these are automatically installed if they are not already present on the host PC. Waiting for these to be installed does at least give you a chance to get used to the lethargic pace at which your computing life will soon be played out.

The main difference between the new version of Act and its predecessors is a reworking of the way in which it integrates with Microsoft Outlook. The Setup wizard gives you the choice of using Act's built-in word processor or Microsoft Word, and of using Act or Outlook to compose and manage e-mails. In addition to Microsoft's mail software, Lotus Notes 6.5 and Eudora are also supported.

The simplest option is to use Act's mail system, which automatically taps into Outlook's contacts. If you choose to compose mail in Outlook, then you'll have to manually establish an Act address book within Outlook in order to attach e-mail messages to contacts. Neither will Act let you use Microsoft Word as Outlook's e-mail editor, so if you normally use this feature you'll have to disable it.

Any open document within Word and Excel can be attached to a contact by means of an Act menu that installs itself on the standard Word and Excel toolbars. The system is effective but clunky: a document can't be attached to Act until it has been saved, but if you forget to save the document first, Act doesn't offer to save it for you. It simply tells you it can't add it to the data store.

On the other hand, if you've saved a document and then typed several pages of additional data into it, Act will attach the document without a murmur of complaint, but what gets attached is the shorter, saved version, not the current one. This is not a major problem once you're aware of it, but a better system would be for Act to update the save before attaching the document, or at least offer this as an option.

The screen layout and toolbars are sensibly arranged and new users will be quick to grasp the basic functions. A sample file of data is provided for experimentation, and there are links to the Act site where a number of introductory tours can be downloaded.

Despite its lumpen performance, Act seems to be completely stable, and not plagued by the glitches present in previous versions. The only one we noticed was an occasional inability to open or close Outlook from the Windows Notifications tray after minimising it.

Verdict
Act does the job it's designed to do, but not with any great speed or flair. For existing users there's not enough here to make an upgrade worthwhile, but for new users it's a viable alternative to FrontRange's GoldMine.

Company: Sage

Contact: 0845 245 0276

Tags: microsoft outlook microsoft palm os windows mail clients gmail microsoft office 2010