Everyone using Opportunities has the same problem. You want to take a look at all of your Opps and analyse them to establish what geographical area they are from, or what the ID Status was, or the industry or market segment, or last results, or phone number.

This is basic information useful in almost any and every company using Act!

All of this information is in Act! but it's in the Contact area (or the Companies area) not the Opportunities area. The problem is how to combine the two.

There has never been a good way to easily get a single report/ Excel sheet with all the information on it.  (I was prompted to write this after speaking to a user yesterday who told me they export the Opps to Excel then export the contacts to Excel then run a VLOOKUP to match the two. PHEW!)

With local installations of Act! you have the option to buy a third party reporting tool that can do the job for you. However, with more and more users taking up Act! as a web-service hosted by Act! themselves (Swiftpage SaaS), third party add-ons are not an option.

The solution could be wonderfully simple. Just copy the relevant field values from the Contacts table to the Opportunities Table at the time you create the opportunity.  Have LINKED OPPORTUNITY FIELDS between Contacts (and Companies) to Opportunities.

It would work in exactly the same way as creating a Company Record from a Contact record does where the data from the Contact table is copied to the Company table at the time the new record is created by having linked fields.

You designate which Contact or Company fields you would like to appear in the opportunity record and define them as Linked Fields. When you create a new Opportunity from a Contact record the relevant data you have selected is copied to matching fields in the Opportunity record.

The benefit is that all of the "missing" information is now available in one Opportunity List View and subsequent Excel spreadsheet for analysis.

The purists will argue that you shouldn't have to do this in a relational database. And they are right; you shouldn't. But that assumes the system gives you some mechanism for analysing some basic data, which Act! doesn't.

The purists will argue that it's a problem because you can have more than one Contact associated with an Opportunity. So just the Contact used to create the Opp gets copied across. If you want to create the Opp first then add a bunch of Contacts then sorry, it won't work.

Let's just make Act! the useful sales tool that it is supposed to be.

Honestly I'm not sure why Swiftpage haven't already implemented support for HTML in details etc for activities, HTML works within History in Act already so the ability is there.

When 2 way sync is enabled between Act and Outlook and an Activity details contain a link this is removed from Act and then ends up being removed from details in Outlook as well leading to missing data and having to go back to the clients asking for the same link. Not very professional. 

More and more people are contactable on a mobile phone (cell phone) rather than on a land-line phone.  

Adding the Mobile Phone field to the selectable field options in the Task List would be a move in the right direction, and would make it easier for users to follow up calls and clear them directly from the task list.

With the continued emphasis on Act! as a web application there would be considerable benefit in adding a few controls to replicate what can easily be done in a Windows environment.

Specifically. Edit - Select All / Deselect All / Refresh.

True, some of these can be done using keyboard shortcuts, but not everyone knows the keyboard shortcuts.

The other difficulty is with list views that span more than one page where functions such as Select All would be helpful.

As a regular Mailchimp and AMA user I'm surprised more ACCs and customers havent asked for the ability to send more than one test email at a time.

Most digital marketers want to test email campaigns to collegues to review and on various email systems. Currently sending individual emails from AMA makes this timeconsuming. Doesn't this functionality AMA make sense? 

More and more customers and potential customers want to move to Act Cloud and not surprisingly expect Act Cloud to integrate with VOIP systems.

All the other CRMs like Zoho, Pipedrive, Insightly etc have been offering this basic VOIP functionality for years.What is so complicated that Act haven’t added a way to integrate any VOIP systems for Act Cloud?   

Act's lack of VOIP integration is killing Acts chances of sales stone dead when potential new to Act customers ask will Act VOIPs integration work with their existing VOIP or planned VOIP provider - "Sorry Act Cloud does not work with any VOIP system!"

Is the ability to  get VOIP integration working with Act on the Act developments team radar and when can we expect to see it being avaialble? 

A long time ago but in the current SQL version there was an option to select "Add to Notes" from a field during importing from CSV etc.

For reasons that don't make sense to me this option was dropped some versions ago. Please can I put a request to have it added back in. The codex must already exist so should not be a huge job to put this function back into the import wizard.

For ACT Cloud, would like to see 2FA or MFA available. I don't like having only a password in between me and the hackers of the world knowing my business. (If this is currently available, someone please correct me. I searched for it in the knowledge base and also asked tech support and they both lead me to believe this isn't available.)

A best practice is to make sure the db is backed up every day.  

However, ACT, pay attention here ...

It is not uncommon that, during the process of the day, a document or two had been left open during the day.  When the scheduled backup starts it fails b/c the user did not close the document(s).

Can the development team give consideration to modifying the backup process with a notice to the user that because a document was left open, no attachments were backed up. 

There could be a number of reasons why a document was open; however, the backup should be completed without attachments.  The reason it should be skipped is because the db doesn't know if the document is in the process of being changed or just open for reading.  

The necessity of the core db being backed up is critical.

And if you are not backing up every day, please adopt this best practice to schedule an automatic daily backup.

Can consideration be given to changing the way the campaign flow chart scrolls up or down the window?

Holding down the control key then using the mouse to move the screen is unintuitive.  When in a window, like this window, one can scroll by just rolling the mouse wheel, which is intuitive.  

Using the scroll wheel performs the same function as reducing or enlarging the image based on the way the wheel is turned.  That is generally associated with the Ctrl and the scroll wheel.

It is just annoying and a time waster.

It was brought to my attention today that when reviewing the dashboard for prior campaigns, the user is returned to base campaign lookup screen.

Can consideration be given to making it possible to have two returns - one for returning to the prior list or the standard return.  

I'm not a programmer, but maybe just adding a check box could be added to the options that says remember the filtered list.

Having experienced the dire performance of Update 1 and then Update 2 to v22 can I suggest that Swiftpage needs to employ some professional QA personnel who also know how to use a group of long time superusers to do proper field testing before rollout.

Then perhaps you won't want to kill someone like I do over the fiasco that is Outlook Integration, or should I say disintegration... 

It took just minutes to show th ehelp desk that Update 2 has not fixed the primary issue of Update 1. It just doesn't load the address book, it locks up Outlook, and therefore it doesn't record history. 

Serious time waste!!!

With the popularity of Microsoft Teams gaining momentum, what steps is ACT taking to create an interface between the two applications.

I see Teams as being an additional tool to enhance ACT.

One of the features of Teams is that it interfaces to Outlook.  While I can't speak for others, my company does not synchronize ACT and Outlook.

Therefore, that would be a key feature that the ACT Phonebook icon that is now in Outlook would be accessible by Teams.

Scheduled activities would be another area that the interface would be helpful.  

These are just some of the areas that the two applications should start dating and get engaged.

I remember in my last sales position in a Fortune 500 technology sales company that the CRM was created for managers and not for sales people.  As a result, I ran ACT along with the company provided CRM.  With companies adopting Teams, there are countless points that Teams can benefit ACT.

I'm just learning Teams, so assuming that this makes it for voting, I hope others will add areas in which the interface would be helpful.  

When you are working with a large lookup - or all contacts - and then you click a specific contact, when you go back to list view you've lost your "place" and need to scroll down to find where you were before clicking the detail view.  It would be nice if the system remembered the contact you'd clicked before you changed to detail view.

This happens even if you click the back button on your browser.  The workaround would be to create a smaller lookup, but in some cases this is not feasible.

On AMA campaigns you can set a specific day and time - it would be nice to have it set to "4th tuesday" or "every 5 weeks"  - adding in the ability to not have to specifically set a time/date.

It is now nice that the columns can be selected to freeze in most list views, but ACT doesn't remember how the user adjusted the width consistently.

While in a contact list view, the columns are not only frozen, but it remember the columns width upon return.

While in the task list view (F7) it will lock the columns but will not remember the width.  

This is another example of ACT inconsistencies.  

Recommendation:  when a change is made in ACT, developers should ask themselves where else within ACT does this need to be changed?

In less than a year I have created over 150 different templates for multi-step projects. It is a lot of template files to keep organized.

I would like to be able to make subfiles for templates in the AMA section. 

Today I was asked if there was a way to run a report on our bounce rate over this year so far.

I did use the dashboard to get the total eMail generated and the % of bounced eMails.  However, I couldn't find a way to get the number of bounces.

My request is for the ACT design team to give more flexibility to the reporting functions of AMA.  

Either, provide multiple "standard" reports or a way for the admin to prepare a customer report.  

I did find it interesting that our bounce rate was 4%, but when I ran an advanced report for the number of bounces within the last 312 days (Jan 1 to Jan 7 this year) it dropped to 1.5%.

The Advanced Lookup included one line of the following criteria:

• Type = Campaign Results
• Field Name - Senddate
• Operator = Year Equals [number]
• Value 2020

Total comes to 10,183 but the Dashboard showed 53,423.  It makes me think that the advanced formulae above only looked at contacts that had a senddate in 2020 and didn't count the multiple senddates within a contact.  So maybe there is a way to COUNT ALL THE SENDDATES within the time period.  If the dashboard can do it, I would like to think that an advanced lookup could do it. 

I'm in the process of cleaning up our database of 50,000 plus contacts.  However, there are a lot of people who have been imported that based on their title are not a prospect within a company.

A tool I'm using is called Secondary Contact Wizard, which is available on the ACT! Market Place.  

I seem to remember there was a checkbox in the past that when the contact dialogue box came up there was a box to check that said something like "Include secondary contacts".

I know this can be done in an advanced search, but that is somewhat time consuming.

Will ACT! give consideration to adding back that check box?