ACT upgrade

[andreasbohlke]

Hi everyone. 

I have a few questions regarding a possible upgrade of ACT. We are currently running ACT premium 2009, and consider upgrading to the 2013 version.

At the moment we have the following setup. We have a main database and then around 15 sales people who are accessing the database through remote databases. We extract our data through microsoft access, and we use this a lot for report sheets and other stuff.  

We are dealing with the following questions/concerns about upgrading

• Web or client/server? Our current setup is as described above --> Is that called a client/server setup? I am not sure how I should understand the info on deployment which is described here: http://www.act.com/products/. Do you choose one kind of deployment or do you have the possibility for several? When choosing a web solution are you still able to extract data the way we are doing it now?     
• Mobile app: We wish to have a mobile application. Is it necessary then to have a web solution? Or is it possible to maintain a setup as we have at the moment, and then still have a mobile solution? The way i have understood things, you need a web solution and you can then access it from the mobile --> via internet. 

My questions might seem a bit stupid, but I think it is difficult to figure out exactly what you can get from an upgrade.

Feel free to give your opinions on this matter!

Thanks it advance. 

Best regards,

Andreas.  

[chrisbunyan]

If you are upgrading and haven't already bought the software then you will be upgrading to v16 (2014)

You could have 1 server with ACT! premium hosting the database and also synchronising to remote users and then ACT! for Web on another server which would host the APFW application and website which would link to the other server and could be in your DMZ. The website would be accessible to the mobile phones, it could also take out the need to have synchronisation for the remote users as they could use the web client, if the functionality meets there needs.

You could if you wanted just use one server and then install from the APFW disk and still have network, remote, web and mobile users.

In any case you should still be able to use access to report from if needed.

If you don't want to use the ACT! mobile client then there are 3rd party apps like companion link http://www.companionlink.com/

I hope this helps.

[andreasbohlke]

Thanks for a good answer. 

I only have one concern. What if I have customized (fields etc) the internally hosted version? As far as I have understood the web version can not be modified in the same way as if you have a client/server setup. Would this create some kind of issues?