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.

The activity series and a great tool. But has great limitations.

When reviewing a series it would be good to be able to see everything in the activity description and if we can't see it in the window then adding the function to be able to export the list of activities from a series to excel so that it can be easily and quickly reviewed for the timeline and descriptions. These are things that are fluid and can change regularly as processed change. 

When creating an activity in the series, that activity should have the same options as any other activity created in ACT. Recurring tab and Details tab etc.

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? 

Wanted to ask what happened to the Email from Template function on the Cloud version?

Desperately need this, as how do I respond to a single contact enquiry with a templated standard answer?

Puzzled as to why this has disapeared... it means I simply can't use the Cloud version for my business...

Please fix asap.

thanks

Sheridan

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. 

The standard fields copied when selecting copy in the contact detail view:

•  Contact Name
• Title
• Company
• Phone
• FAX
• Address
• City, State, Zip
• eMail

Could consideration be given to allowing the user to select the field that are included in the copy command.  For those of us who are keyboarders, that would be a great time saver.

For example, for the phone and FAX, it would be nice to have the title included for each.  

Another nice feature would be to have additional fields.  For example, in our db we have the field "Mobile Phone".

Based on other users of ACT and their industry, I imagine other fields would be important for this quick copy command.

If a field selected is empty, it would be skipped without a blank line.

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!!!

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?

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.

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.

Linkedin has risen to be a key resource for Act users - or at least at my company.

I would like to see an activity type called Linkedin with results of 

• Sent Message
• Received Message

In the latest activity field would be the date of the Linkedin communication.

We have Linkedin as an activity now, but it does not update the latest activities.

I have just made a blunder when copying a campaign and believe it could be one that others have made and new users will make.

Description:

After clicking on copy campaign, I entered the name of the group, which is my test group; however, I failed to remove the inclusion group(s) or exclusion group(s).

Our process is simple, all new campaigns MUST be sent to a TEST group.  Once the user is satisfied with the results of the test, we then add the target group as an inclusion group and add the test group as an exclusion group.

Because I failed to remove the test group that was an exclusion (thereby eliminating any tests to go out) and failed to remove the inclusion group that was part of the original campaign, group from the prior campaign received all 4 eMails since the time for all was "Instant Release" and none were sent to the test group.

Recommendation:

Could consideration be given to prompting the user if they want to keep any inclusion or exclusion list before the new copy is created.  Just a reminder when the create button is clicked to tell the user there are inclusion and/or exclusion lists.  Do you want to continue?

It appears that the only thing that can be done to the entries under the Campaign Results tab is to either export or delete.

I would like to recommend that the fields be made available for searches.

Whenever I have a campaign that has more than one scheduled activity, the space on the screen is not enough to see all the elements.

In most Windows Compliant programs, using the scroll wheel on the mouse scrolls the image up or down instead of changing the size..

Could consideration be given to exchanging the function of the control wheel with Ctrl-LeftClick when in the campaign view. 

As an aside, both scroll and Ctrl-Scroll do the same thing.

Would it be too much to expect some basic data validation when entering an email address into an email field?

You can't stop typos, but you could check for a "@" symbol and a "."

When building a campaign, it would be nice if we could add notes to the different steps that are planned.  This would be especially helpful when bringing on new people and reminding them what needs to be done.  

When doing research on Campaigns, we have the ability to do a lookup based on the data in the Campaign Results tab.

However, once the lookup is done, it is not possible to include any of the fields to be included in the list view.  Therefore, it is not possible to do and Excel export of the found data.

Could consideration be given to allowing us to include Campaign data fields to an advanced lookup?  Subsequently to also have those fields included in an excel export and subsequently into a pivot table.

We have repeatedly asked for the ability to add any contact fields to the task list and add-ons are available to do this but it should be a basic function.

The task list with this ability becomes a loading and scheduling tool for deliveries and field activity scheduling and would greatly enhance ACT.

This has been requested before, we need to be able to export the activity details when exporting the task list. It has it as a column option but only exports the activity type. 

Thanks!