In Outlook the ACT! Address Book Slow Loading & Has Limited Lookup

[#1]

In Outlook the ACT! Address Book Slow Loading & Has Limited Lookup      

 

I have been a user of ACT! for over 15 years & have been using ACT! Email and not Outlook for two main reasons which I will mention below. Now, since my ACT! Email database is getting too large I hade no choice to move over to Outlook.

 

I was told by someone at ACT! that if enough people on this forum make enough “noise” then they would rectify this matter in a patch versus waiting a year for a new version (or never doing anything about it if they see this is not a big enough issue). I know that I am not the only so please, let’s all get together and show the importance of this matter.

 

I cannot run my business the way things are!

THE ISSUE:

ACT! By Sage promotes the beauty of Outlook integration but I beg to differ:

 

1. ACT! by Sage Premium 2010 Version 12.0.409.0, Hotfix 1 and 4 gigs of RAM, Windows Vista and 2.0 GHZ dual core process. I also have Outlook 2003. I have 20 thousand+ contacts.

 

2. My Outlook is now integrated with ACT! (the ACT! address book is linked to Outlook).

 

3. When I open a blank email from Outlook to compose, I click the “TO” button to choose the one ore more emails (contacts) I want to send the email to. When I do this, it takes 1-2 minutes to open the address book. How can people work like this, especially if they send over 50 emails per day?

 

4. When the “AC! Address book” finally opens up, it is in an Outlook Lookup window. The ONLY option you have to do a look up is by “First name”. This is ridiculous! I don’t remember everyone’s first name. Plus, you can’t look up by company.

 

5. Another issue is that if I were to use Outlook within the ACT! email editor, it works the way I want it but the problem is that I have multiple email accounts. (I send “from” different email addresses). This option allows me to only have one account. Where just using ACT! email I was able to have multiple emails to email from.

 

6. SOLUTION I DESIRE:

a. Just like I can in ACT! email, where I can easily look up by company or last name from the “TO” field when composing an email,  I wish I can do the same thing within Outlook.

b. When opening Address book within Outlook, I want it to open quickly and not have to wait 1 to 2 minutes for the address book to pop up. (for each email I want to send!)

 

Final Comments:

·        Others will tell me that I need to reduce the size of my database. My response is I can’t because I need these contact. Plus, another person in this forum has the same issue and he only has 8 thousand contacts. The ACT! email “TO” (when composing an email) database loads fast so why can’t ACT! do the same for Outlook?

 

·        If you are in Outlook, you can click on the “Attach To ACT! Contacts” button to manually attach an incoming email. The window that pops up opens quickly and it is from the ACT! database, within ACT!. If the ACT! Programmers can do that then I am sure they can quickly do this similar thing and address my request above.

 

·        Is my request unreasonable?

 

·        Will ACT! get its programmers to do a patch within the next week to resolve this issue?

 

·        Will enough people “make some noise” to get this thing noticed?

Thank you.