ACT needs separate alarms for marketing calls and meetings [ Edited ]

[Dan****]

I'm a LONG time ACT user and have always felt it is the best option for customizing your screen and keeping track of leads and clients.  The one area I still feel the program falls short on is scheduled notifications.  ACT needs alternate alarms.  The general Alarm for "To Do" and "Call" is fine but there needs to be a  separate alarm for meetings such as on site and conference calls.  If i depended on ACT to notify me of a scheduled CC I'd never see the notification because of scheduled sales calls I have on that day.  Not all my marketing calls get done since I have possibly 100 alarms on many days.  

My present solutions is to use Outlook for scheduled meetings and ACT for scheduled cold calls.  If anyone has a better solution, I'm all ears.

[Gary W]

Hi Dan,

Have you though about creating some custom activity types for those site visits and conference calls, and then using the task list to see what upcoming and overdue activities you have?

The alarms window was never really designed to contain 100 separate alarms. Something filterable like the task list would likely be a much better solution.

[Dan****]

Thanks for your thoughts. So your saying if I'm wanting to schedule a future cold call I shouldn't use the "call" option to set a time/date? custom Activity types are all going to pop up in the same alarm window. It really doesn't matter if i mark it as task or call, they will still all come up under alarms and not as a separate notification.

[Gary W]

I was suggesting using custom activity types so that you can easily filter them in the Task List to quickly find, and get a better overview of your daily tasks.
You're right, they will still all be shown in the same alarm window, but if you were to set distinctive icons for each type, you might have an easier time identifying those more important tasks in the window.

[Dan****]

Is there a way to look at alarms ONLY related to tasks or related to calls?

[Gary W]

It's not possible to filter the actual alarms, but you could see just the call activities scheduled for today by using the filters in your task list.

[Dan****]

Thanks for your thoughts but again, I've been using ACT for many year, I believe now 18 and this is a real need so I'm sticking with my orginal solution. ACT needs a separate alarm/notification for scheduled meetings/Conference Calls.

[Gary W]

Feel free to post this idea on our Share Your Ideas board, where others can give it Kudos, and where our Product Management team look for popular new ideas for Act.