SHARE YOUR IDEAS

Many people assume that ACT! does this already and are somewhat perplexed to find that it doesn't. We also need to be able to automatically create companies when importing contact data. Probably the best way to handle this would be to have some additional options in Preferences.

Option 1 - Do not automatically create Companies from Contacts.

Option 2 - Always create a new company if it doesn't exist when adding a new contact and automatically add to a company if it already exists.

Option 3 - Always create and link a new company if it doesn't exist when adding a new contact and automatically link to the company if it already exists.

Jeff

Isn't it about time that ACT! supported field calculations?

In contacts, Companies, Groups and  Sales Opportunities

It's time to standardise where attached documents go in ACT! At the moment, if I'm looking for attached documents they could be in a number of different places:

The Documents Tab

Attached to a History record

Attached to a Note

Attached to an Activity

This makes them difficult to find.

Can I propose that ALL attached documents and Links to Documents go into the Documents Tab

History, Notes and Acivities show Links to the relevant document or link in the Documents Tab.

Jeff

Can we not make colour coding in calendars and task-lists more flexible? 

Many people have asked me if they could colour code the ACT! Users (i.e. sales people or service people) to make it easy to see what they are doing on the calendars and task lists.

Jeff

"Left message" it should not update the date reached.  Obviously if I had to leave a message I DID NOT REACH THE CLIENT.  This makes the last reach date in the record worthless and I need this to be accurate.  Left Message means I have left them a message and is different from call attempted.

I want to highlight and move 2+ tasks to the next day, but there is no way to do this.  You mean I have to move them one-by-one? What a waste of time!

It would  be a  great benefit if ACT had the capability to highlight something from another source (i.e.internet) and then drag and drop it in a 'Contact record' and ACT would automatically insert the information in the respective fields.  In other words, suppose the below is the information  you found on a website.

Joe Blow

XYZ Inc.

456 Main Street.

Somewhere, CA 92445

phone : 223-456-7890

Fax: 223-456-8956

Email: Jblow@somewhere.com

All you would have to do is highlight the above and drag it and drop it in a blank Contact form in ACT and the fields would be auotmatically populated. 

The ability to automatically limit access to Contact Records based on the value of a field or fields (Similar to a Query)

E.g.

Based on the City Field - Create "Limited Access Rules" where a field value defines the Limited Access nature of a Contact Record to certain Users.

If City = Dublin Then Limit Access to the Dublin Team

This idea would be especially useful for ACT! for Web users.

Thanks and thanks for this forum

David

I would like to propose an additional icon in Outlook: "Go to Contact", which takes you directly to the ACT! Contact based on an email match.

In fact, a combined " Create and Go To" and "Attach and Go To" options would be welcomed as well as you often need to add some changes to a record as a result of receiving an email from that Contact.

Jeff

My sales force is organised into a number of teams and I use team membership to limit each team to view only their allocated range of contacts.

The problem I have is that when new contacts are added to the database I have to remember to manually update the Access List to assign the new contact to the correct sales team and 'hide' it from the other teams.

What I'd like to see is a way to automatically update Access Lists depending upon a value in a field in a similar way to Dynamic Group / Company Membership.

Wouldn't it be nice if you went to lookup "J Smith" and you were offered "J. Smith"? Or if you tried to lookup "Leicestershire" and you were offered misspelled records such as "Liecestershire". Or if you tried to lookup a phone number "01234 567 789" and it found " 012 345  67 789", even if it was in a different phone field to the one you selected. (And yes, I know about the lookup any phone field, and I can't understand why it's not the default, but that's another story).

Jeff

I just received an email from a company(not a contact) and have no way to attach this to the company.  What should I do with this?  I cannot attach it to an individual in the company because it does not belong to anyone at the company. 

Sage, can you add additional functionality so we could create and attach incoming emails that do not belong to an individual contact? iIf emails come from a company, what should we do with them in order to create a complete company history? Shouldn't contacts and companies be more balanced rather than being MOSTLY contact centered?

Thank you!

Pat

Our ACT! Certified Consultants have suggested that integrating Instant Messaging to ACT! would be beneficial.

There's a couple of ways we could integrate Instant Messaging:

1) Internal - users of ACT can now communicate with each other real time inside of their database

2) External- Integrate with facebook, AIM, Yahoo, and other instant messaging services to communicate with customers real time who are using any IM program with results going to history of that contact.

Any other suggestions on integrating messaging?

I use the mail merge feature to send out and an email to each contact that I add throughout the day.  It is the same every time and I never send it to multiple contacts.  

Here are the steps to do a simple mail merge to a single contact:

1. Pull down the Write menu
2. Choose mail merge
3. Choose Email
4. Click Next
5. Browse to the email that I would like to send
6. Click next
7. Choose current contact
8. Click Next
9. Type the subject (even though it doesn't change each time) 
10. Click Next
11. Set the missing email options
12. Click next
13. Click Finish

I just encountered a very serious email privacy violation that was facilitated by having Act and Outlook integrated. Consider the scenario where all Act Users have access to the entire database of contacts. This setup is both necessary and preferred because our salespersons share many of the same contacts, selling them different products. Sharing contact information (activities, histories, proposals and sales) promotes greater awareness for our salespersons and a better experience for the customer. Now consider the following 3 company employees, an HR Manager, a Sales Manager (MGR), and a Salesperson (SP). The manager and the salesperson are both Act users whereas the HR person is not an Act user. SP is not performing well and MGR exchanges emails with HR discussing termination of SP. Meanwhile SP suspects that he may be getting terminated so he adds HR into the Contact database under a false name and company but with HR's actual email address.

MGR continues to exchange emails with HR, never suspecting that HR's email address would ever be in the Contact database so he does not bother to mark his email as Private. In fact he regards sending emails to fellow employees as being totally unrelated to the Act database because there is absolutely no need to store non-sales related employees in the Act database. Now the 'sneaky' (but clever) salesperson has access to the email exchange between HR and MGR because it is recorded in Act History!

Can this 'flaw' be fixed in Act? I had hoped that I could impose a validation on field 'E-mail' in the database, e.g. "does not contain @MyDomain.com" where MyDomain.com is the suffix on all our employees email addresses. I could not find a way to do this under the edit option of "Define Fields" afforded by Act. The downside to this proposed solution is that it would mean that field "E-mail" could not be populated on any User records and therefore would not be available for use in shared templates.

Another solution I suggested to Act Support was the availability of a domain name option when setting up email configuration in Act. This could be a domain name that would suppress recording emails in Act History if the "to" and "from" email address domain names were the same, i.e. inter-office emails amongst fellow employees. This of course would be optional but in my case, would suffice as a solution to combat the confidentiality breach described earlier.

I am sure there are cleverer ways to avoid the problem I have articulated but the "Mark as Private" or "do not record in history" are most certainly not viable solutions for my company. I need something that can be setup at the administrator level and is not dependant upon users having to remember to check privacy boxes, especially when they are in Outlook and communicating with a fellow employee who is not even an Act user. So how can 'devious' salespersons as described earlier be thwarted from abusing the Act-Outlook integration?

Somebody help me please because the owner of the company is threatening to throw out Act because of this confidentiality breach.

It would be really useful to have the Task List sorting be like the Sort List function when viewing the contact list - i.e. the ability to sort by multiple columns rather than just a single column.

A big issue is that after setting up your ACT! e-mail to automatically create history you find that confidential e-mails sent to people in your own company automatically appear in that person's record in ACT!

We need a way to disable this behavior.

Quickly!

Jeff

I would like Act to be able to recognize multiple email addresses for a customer so that outlook could also attach emails regardless of which email address they used.

Have a primary email and a secondary field created. 

Thanks