multiple users

[mlk49]

Hi,

• I am in a group which constantly invite people to join the group.  We would like to keep track of the communication we have with our visitors.  We may also work together on a project.  We  need a tool to communicate.  Is ACT! able to do what we want to do.  People in the group don't work in the same company.  Could we share the same database and know who has contacted which visitors, who has made an appointment with which visitors.

Your assistance is very much appreciated.

[chieff · Accepted solution]

Part of the ACT! to Outlook email integration is the ability to add a rule in Outlook that automatically attaches incoming e-mail to the history of the sender, provided it can match up the sender's e-mail address to some record in ACT! with the same e-mail address.  It doesn't setup automatically - you have to, as part of the installation, add that rule to each user's Outlook.  If the customer sends that e-mail to more than one user on ACT! who all have the rules in place, it will attach more than once to the history of the sender.  By the way, when the e-mail gets attached to history, the Record Manager of that history entry is the logged-in user (the recipient) who's Outlook attached the e-mail.

It works pretty well.

[rbrust]

ACT could definitely do what you want it to, but the one thing I'd recommend is to be sure and get the Web version (also called Premium) of ACT, which will allow you and the other users to access it via a browser.  The database would be on a designated computer, visible to others using a browser.

The way ACT would work in your example below is that ACT records items - Notes, History, Activities, Contact record updates/entries - using a field called the Record Manager, which represents the database users.  This will "track" who has done what with each of the contacts.

[chieff]

ACT! is best suited to those organizations where everyone sits in the same office, on the same network and shares a database on a server in the office.  Once you have geographically dispersed users, you spend a lot of time and money making ACT! available to distant users - issues with firewalls, Fixed IP addresses, iis servers, limited browser support, a growing list of problems and incompatibilities with the existing Web client, and in your case the frequency with which users come and go, I would not recommend ACT! for the situation that you've described.

[mlk]

Hi,

Thank you, Kevin and Richard for your replies.  I am learning how to use this forum.

A few more questions:

For both Kevin and Richard:

If the users sit in the same office on the same server, how does ACT! handle multiple users who communicate with the same contacts.  My preliminary understanding is that

• Emails sent by different users to the same one contact will be recorded on the ACT! database under that contact.
• Emails received from that contact, it will go to the ACT! database only when the users take an action to copy the received emails to ACT!

Could you please help clcarify my understanding.

For Richard, Could I know your further comments? 

For Kevin, Do you know any product which can do what I have described?

Thank you very much.

Regards

[chieff · Accepted solution]

Part of the ACT! to Outlook email integration is the ability to add a rule in Outlook that automatically attaches incoming e-mail to the history of the sender, provided it can match up the sender's e-mail address to some record in ACT! with the same e-mail address.  It doesn't setup automatically - you have to, as part of the installation, add that rule to each user's Outlook.  If the customer sends that e-mail to more than one user on ACT! who all have the rules in place, it will attach more than once to the history of the sender.  By the way, when the e-mail gets attached to history, the Record Manager of that history entry is the logged-in user (the recipient) who's Outlook attached the e-mail.

It works pretty well.

[rbrust]

A couple comments  below from your second message, and then an overall comment below that...

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mlk wrote:

Hi,

Thank you, Kevin and Richard for your replies.  I am learning how to use this forum.

A few more questions:

For both Kevin and Richard:

If the users sit in the same office on the same server, how does ACT! handle multiple users who communicate with the same contacts.  My preliminary understanding is that

• Emails sent by different users to the same one contact will be recorded on the ACT! database under that contact.

Exactly - each email will be recorded (under that contact), and the History item (which is how emails get recorded) will be "owned" by the user that sent the email.  So, each one of your group could send an email to *one* contact, and each of the emails sent will be recorded separately and uniquely.

• Emails received from that contact, it will go to the ACT! database only when the users take an action to copy the received emails to ACT!

Sort of - you could do it manually (as per your example), because when you "link" Outlook and ACT there are icons "installed" into Outlook that allow you to manually Attach to Contact - i.e. attach an email to a contact in ACT matching on email address.  However, as Kevin mentioned, you *can* also create an Outlook rule that will do this automatically (if you want every email attached).  Again, whether it's manual or automatic, Outlook/ACT match on email address, so it won't attach an email from someone that is not in your ACT database.

Furthermore, newer versions of ACT have the capability to "ignore" inter-office emails, so you don't get alot of unnecessary emails attached to the user's records. (Note - ACT automatically creates a record for each users of the database).

Could you please help clcarify my understanding.

For Richard, Could I know your further comments? 

OK, now I have a big disagreement about Kevin's post - very, very few of my accounts are where all the users are in the same office.  ACT is built to be a client/server (publisher/subscriber in ACT-speak) system whether you're 10 feet, 10 miles, or 10 states away from each other.  Whether you install and configure the web component, you can have remote users.

I don't know how much you've researched the whole ACT "system", but getting ACT up and running in an office where they own/manage their own server and internet settings is very straight-forward.  Getting ACT up and running in an environment where you don't have control - whether your server is hosted, or you're just using a "server" in your home - is not much more difficult.

Again, there's more to this that I want to dump out in a post, so if you want to know the "techy" details, I'd be glad to help out.

For Kevin, Do you know any product which can do what I have described?

Thank you very much.

Regards

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[mlk49]

I will contact you individually. Thank you.