Larry Ritter's Development Blog

ACT! by Sage 2010 is HERE!

larryr — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 13:36:04 GMT

ACT! 2010 (English) is now available for customer delivery in North America! We officially released the gold files yesterday— check out our video of ACT! 2010 literally going "out the door"!

If you’ve been following my blog, you’ll know that I’ve been discussing this significant release for the last several weeks, and now it’s finally here.

From a development perspective, I am very proud of this release for several reasons. The new ACT! 2010 release includes a wealth of new feature innovations, usability enhancements that make it even easier to learn and use, and technology that improves our ability to provide timely software updates. A sample of the new features includes:

New Look: Easier to navigate and better discoverability to quickly accomplish tasks.
Improved and New reports: More than a dozen new reports, plus a handy favorite’s area.
Social Media: Track contacts and be better informed with turnkey integration to leading sites, plus you can quickly and easily add your own sites.
ACT! E-Marketing: An optional service that helps you better understand your contacts by knowing who is opening and clicking through your e-mail campaigns. Drip campaigns make it easy to set up multi-stage campaigns. And, automated call lists that point out your hottest prospects.
Customizable Opportunities: Tune your opportunities to precisely fit your business.
Improved Dashboards: 12 new components and 2 new Dashboards. Know in seconds what contacts are newly created and recently changed, and more….

To prepare for the launch, I was in New York and Boston last week introducing ACT! 2010 to Journalists and Analysts. Given the strength of the feature set, my job was pretty easy, and a lot fun. Many commented that the capabilities in ACT! 2010 either don’t exist in products costing much more and/or the level of integration and ease of use in ACT! is superior. I look forward to lots of positive coverage over the coming weeks.

While in Boston, I also met with a number of our local ACT! Certified Consultants. They were really stoked about ACT! 2010, so we captured a couple of impromptu videos:

Karen Rankin, Actability

Joe Norcott, Business Technologies of New England

See ACT! 2010 for yourself.

View our social media release.

That’s it for now. Enjoy the new ACT!

Larry

Message Edited by larryr on 09-01-2009 06:38 AM

Get Social With ACT!

larryr — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 17:02:43 GMT

Get Social With ACT!

We’ve had a number of articles about how social media and ACT! are very complementary. From beta, a number of you have made comments about how cool the “web info” tab is in ACT! 2010. This is a very easy and helpful way for ACT! users to quickly navigate the social media space. In support of our initiatives in social media we’ve formed a number of groups at the leading social media sites. I encourage each of you, and a friend to join one or more of the following groups:

Twitter - www.act.com/twitter

LinkedIn - www.act.com/linkedin

Facebook - www.act.com/facebook

Plaxo - www.act.com/plaxo

YouTube - www.act.com/youtube

MySpace - www.act.com/myspace

When you join these groups, you will have easy access and a place to share information about ACT!. In fact, I just noticed a very interesting article from Forrester on how ACT! has been successful in using Social Media. This fall, look for a number of additional webinars, whitepapers and news articles from Sage on how ACT! and Social Media are a natural fit.

Looking forward to seeing you many of you in the groups above. Why not join right now? ACT! is all about community!

Larry

Take a Test Drive of ACT! 2010

larryr — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 22:18:07 GMT

Take a Test Drive of ACT! 2010, See the New User Experience

The ACT! 2010 beta period has ended and our Development team is now heads down in the final “closedown” phase as we near release. I’m pleased to report the final feedback continues to be very positive.

Early bird sales are in full swing and we now have an on-line test drive so you can get a hands-on feel for the upcoming release. Check out the following links:

Early Bird Sales

Take a Test Drive

Whether you are a new or experienced ACT! user, notice the fresh user interface. With more than 2.8 million users, ACT! is all about being productive on the tasks performed every day. Early in the ACT! 2010 development we conducted a number of studies and interviews to better understand common tasks and get feedback on how to streamline. We received great input from our Customer Advisory Board, Certified Consultants, existing ACT! customers and people not using ACT!. This feedback was incredibly helpful to improve the navigation, make features easier to discover, streamline tasks, suggest related tasks and more. We also benchmarked a number of tasks comparing ACT! 2010, previous versions of ACT! and competitive products. ACT! 2010’s navigation fared very well in these tests and look for whitepapers providing greater explanation and detail after launch.

The sites referenced above are intended for North American customers. If you live outside of North America, please contact Sage locally for specific ACT! 2010 plans offers in your region.

Regards, Larry

Message Edited by tmergel on 09-08-2009 10:15 AM

Check it out - ACT! 2010 Coming Soon!

larryr — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 03:05:34 GMT

A couple of events signal an exciting time of year for ACT!. One is when beta for the next release begins and another when Early Bird sales begin. Beta started on June 30 and Early Bird Sales started yesterday - July 14! Here’s an update on both.

I have been especially excited about ACT! 2010 since we previewed the release with our ACT! Certified Consultants (ACC’s) in May at the Sage Insights Conference. The reviews from this group of ACT! specialists were nothing short of phenomenal. The ACC’s were impressed by the thought that went into ACT! 2010 - from usability tests which guided changes in navigation to the range of high impact new features - they were anxious to start talking about ACT! 2010 right away!

Beta feedback has been equally positive. Last week we held focused “Beta Day” events with groups of ACC’s in several cities across the United States. We received excellent feedback from this highly energized group of special participants. The broader end-user Beta is also going well. Less than 2 weeks into the program we are oversubscribed and have more than 1400 posts to the ACT! 2010 Beta Newsgroup. To our Beta users, we ask quantitative and qualitative questions as part of “homework” surveys. Here is a sample of questions and top 2 box responses (5 boxes – Very satisfied, Somewhat satisfied, Neutral, Somewhat dissatisfied, Dissatisfied) from the survey as of July 14:

Overall, how would you rate your product experience with this beta version of ACT!? 83% Top 2 Box
How strongly do you agree with the statement "ACT! by Sage 2010 will help grow my business"? 75% Top 2 Box
How strongly do you agree with the statement "ACT! by Sage 2010 will help me become more productive"? 83% Top 2 Box
Compared to the navigation in previous versions of ACT!, would you say the navigation experience in ACT! 2010 is: 73% Top 2 Box
On a scale of 1-10, "1" being not at all likely and "10" being very likely: How Likely would you be to recommend ACT! 2010 to a friend or colleague? 65% Top 2 Box (rated as 9 or 10)
Would you participate in another ACT! beta program? 99% Top Box

Equally exciting are qualitative comments we received from Beta users. Here’s a sample:

“Great to see this feature [iCalendar] incorporated. You people have really out done yourselves with the new features this year. It is nice not to have to switch back and forth between ACT! and outlook. ”
“Have been testing this and so far I really like it. I have used other programs, GM for example, and so far this out performs it.”
“Long time user of ACT! and continue to love the product and evolution it has taken.”
“I certainly can be more productive as ACT! by Sage 2010 is faster and easier to use than previous editions.”
“This version is by far the best ever. You will blow away your competition on this version. I never used the Opportunity layout before and now I spent all my time there trying to tailor it to my needs. Awesome! Give yourselves a pat on the back. I am an ACT! addict now.”
“The Web Info tab is great and VERY beneficial to a sales team needing to get background information about a potential client. Great Idea!”

As you can imagine, the enitre ACT! team is excited and anxious to unfold the next chapter of one of the longest running titles in the SW industry. As mentioned, Early Bird Sales in North America for ACT! 2010 started yesterday. If you already received an offer, simply follow the link or call instructions. If you did not, and you live in North America, click on the url below or simply call us at:

888-507-2010

http://offer.act.com/2010/landing/index/EBSLSTDSU9

If you live outside of North America, ACT! 2010 information will be available soon from your regional Sage Operating Company.

I hope you enjoy what we’ve done with ACT! – also, note some of the capabilities we discussed in our recent 3 part series “Social Contact Management” made their way into ACT! 2010 – check out the “web information” tab!

Regards, Larry

ACT! and the Web - Social Contact Management: Part 3 of 3

larryr — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 22:26:17 GMT

Part 3 of 3: “How ACT! can help me in the new Internet enabled World”

In Part 2 we saw how our prospects are increasingly being influenced by sources they find on the Web. Fortunately, the internet works for all us. So as a vendor working with a prospect we can also leverage the Web to gather information about our prospects. At Sage, we emphasized a concept we call the “Anywhere Workforce Experience” in our Sage CRM Solutions 2010 strategy. See the published strategy whitepaper for full details though at the core is the fact we are already taking advantage of and plan to go deeper in terms of exploiting the Web.

For example, within ACT! there are a number of convenient plug-ins or “mash-ups” available that pass contents from relevant fields to a variety of internet services. For example, some really simple “mash-ups” pass the name of the current contact I am viewing to common search engines, like Google. The results are then conveniently displayed. without any further user action. Then as I transition to another contact, the same results are displayed for that contact – providing convenient “in-context” results for each contact. This means results are automatically updated and always up to date as I move between contacts. Others are available for displaying driving directions, searching for names on Social Networking sites, like LinkedIn, etc. These simple but powerful concepts enable ACT! users to leverage and harness the internet to make us more productive when dealing with our customers. Your ACT! Certified Consultant can help you with these “mash-ups” and/or you can download them from the Developers Network portion of this community.

We intend to go further in this space by looking at a company and leveraging services that provide additional names of contacts within the firm. Other examples would be to use the result of search to find related contacts, customers and influencers. This would enable me to understand the extended connections of my prospect and how they might be brought to bear on a particular opportunity.

We are in the infant stages of Social CM. We expect to continuously improve the connectivity and benefits of leveraging the internet and ACT!. We have a range of ideas from simple connections to existing internet sites to fully functioning services that operate independently.

I hope this 3 part series was interesting to you. Since I started this series I had the chane to presnet at the North America Sage Insights conference. I shaerd some thoughts on how Socila Media is shaping the Contact Management and CRM space with our partners and a numebr of Analysts. This led to an invite to be one of 30 bloggers in a recent CRM Magazine focus on the topic. Here is the link for the interested:

http://www.destinationcrmblog.com/2009/06/16/social-media-maturity-model-information-wants-to-find-you/

I’d love to hear your ideas for services and internet connections that would be of most interest to you.

Larry

ACT! and the Web - Social Contact Management: Part 2 of 3

larryr — Tue, 12 May 2009 11:55:20 GMT

In this Part 2, we’ll look at the changing nature of the way our customers/prospects acquire information about our products, service and company.

ACT! and the Web - Social Contact Management: Part 1 of 3

larryr — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 01:52:00 GMT

Learn how the Web + ACT! generates new opportunties fto better understand and manage contacts.

ACT! 2009 (v11) Update

larryr — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 01:35:11 GMT

Here's some early feedback on the latest...

v10.0.3 is Available for Download

larryr — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 22:10:27 GMT

10.0.3 available - with v11 in market why are you telling me this?

The direction of ACT!

larryr — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 00:15:17 GMT

Glenn recently posted a reply to David van Toor’s blog in which he commented that he thought ACT! had deliberately moved away from the single user to the larger customer, and asked this question “…is ACT!/Sage in any way trying to retain the individual user who is NOT a member of any larger corporate entity?.” Yes, we do intend to retain individual users.