ACT! Blog - Act! Certified Consultants in Belgium | M4Y

IE8 is realeased!

Xavier Nyssen — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 14:34:00 +0100

What about compatibility with SageCRM or ACT for Web?

SageCRM is officially compatible with Internet Explorer only... Why? Because some features, scripting, comportment ,… don’t work well with other browsers like Firefox, Opera, Chrome or Safari. However, you could use one of these browsers, but sometimes you’ll encounter one weird comportment: drop-down not appearing correctly, and more.

Now, Microsoft announces Internet Explorer 8. For the software’s giant it is an essential step because its competitors, especially Mozilla Firefox, are winning world parts each day.
All other browser's editors are fighting since a long time on levels who are important for developers and users:
- Security
- Speed (HTML, Ajax/Javascript,…)
- Web standards (W3C)
- Extensibility
- …

Microsoft was late in every domain since too much time. Will this brand new version be THE tool to beat its competitors? The answer is definitely ‘no’. Because Opera, Google, Mozilla and Apple didn’t wait for Microsoft and already have a stable browser which has most of the new IE8’s features.
BUT… The Microsoft’s effort to create a new fast, secure and standards compliant is real. So, and it is the subject of this article, it would be possible that SageCRM’s users encounter some problem with this version.

After our first tests, we didn’t encounter any major issue with this release. More, we noticed that SageCRM is faster than before with this version, and it is significant. But if you should encounter one issue, you have to know that Microsoft thought about compatibility issues for websites “designed for Internet Explorer only” which are not W3C’s standard compliant: the compatibility view!

Simply click on 'Tools > Compatibility View' menu:

More, you can also manage settings for each website. Click on 'Tools > Compatibility View Settings' menu:

Thanks to this feature, SageCRM’s users could be sure that their CRM could be totally used with the new release of Internet Explorer.
It is really a good point for all of these companies who still have IE6 because they have internal web application which are only compatible with this old version.
Now, you could ask you IT dept. to update Internet Explorer for everybody and gain from all new features of IE8.
For more details on these features, please read the article on Microsoft’s website: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/tour/default.aspx

Note: we didn't yet tested ACT for Web with IE8 but it is probably more safe to turn on Compatibility View for it also.

ACT! By Sage 2009 is available

Xavier Nyssen — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 09:00:00 +0200

This brand new release is available since Augustus in the USA. For the rest of the world, the release should be available in the next days or weeks.

What about this version? Not really many new features. But as we use it since its beta version, we have to tell that this is the most stable version ever since the famous 6.0 version. This release is not only stable, but also very fast. All users still in version 2007 (9.0) or previous should upgrade whitout any hesitation. For users in version 2008 (10.0) it is probably less obvious to pay for a new release which doesn't give you a real new feature. Except if you really need a better Outlook integration.

The improved e-mail integration provides you more options for tracking and organizing e-mails in ACT: on-the-fly e-mail history recording, attaching e-mails en masse, scheduling an activity from the e-mail and especially the ability to use the native outlook rules to record an e-mail in ACT.

Search capabilities were also improved: the dialog box has been enhanced with new options and you have a new submenu in Lookup which gives you a fast access to your previous lookups.

Calendar printouts have been improved and Premium users could now select more than 10 users in the calendar filters.

It is also easier to configure the scheduler at your needs. And the synchronization box has been really improved to show you what data is tranferring step-by-step.

You'll find all details about these new feature on the Knowledge Base: What's new in ACT By Sage 2009 (11.0).

Major update for our addons

Stephen Lemaire — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 16:17:00 +0200

Act! 2009 will be there soon and our addons have been upgraded to support this new version.

ACT! 10.0.3 Available

Stephen Lemaire — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 11:47:00 +0200

The following items listed below identify new features and important corrected issues in the 10.0.3 release:

Mail Merge

Improved usability when using e-mail mail merge. Mail merge will use the primary email address field and if one cannot be found, it will look the personal email address. If there is not a personal email address, it will use the first custom email address it can find.

Microsoft® Excel Integration

The task list can be exported to Excel using a task bar icon or a right mouse button click menu command.

Printing Address Books

All contact details are printed on the same page using any address book template.

Report Templates

Contact Report template property “HideOnEmptySubReports” now defaults to “No” so that contact details are printed even if the contact does not have activities, notes, history or opportunities.

Activities/History/Notes

Activity details were reset to blank when rescheduling an activity from the activity conflict alert dialog.
Clear alarm button did not clear all selected alarms, only the first alarm was cleared.
Activities scheduled with another user did not roll over.
Updating activities with Outlook did not respect date range filter when dealing with recurring activities.
You can now reschedule conflicting activities without losing the details captured in the activity.
Drag & dropping activities within an activity series prompt to update activities that are within the series.
The regarding field saves when clearing an activity.
The start times for an activity displays the appropriate 24 hour time when users are on a 24 hour clock.
In some cases when updating a previous database to ACT! 10.0, alarms for old activities became active again.

Microsoft® Outlook E-Mail Integration

Improved usability when sending e-mail message by clicking into an e-mail address field. A new message is opened which is no longer minimized to the task bar.
When using the “Next e-mail” menu item in Outlook with Microsoft Word as the e-mail editor and using the “Attach to ACT! contact” feature, it always attached the first message instead if the current message.
E-mail messages that were attached from Outlook to ACT! using the “Entire message as attachment” option could not be opened in ACT! if the Outlook message had a Follow Up Flag set.

Opportunities

Users could not use the tab key to navigate to the next field after entering “$” into the opportunity cost or price field.

Database Synchronization

Improvements of file synchronization engine to account for conflict checking, 0 byte files and security issues.
Synchronization no longer fails with an error message “Synchronization has failed. Server Error Description: Incorrect syntax near ' AS DEFAULT VALUE, '. Contact your administrator for assistance.” when the default field value contains an apostrophe..
Reduced the time to synchronize file attachments between an ACT! host database and an ACT! remote database significantly, what used to take hours now takes minutes.
Supplemental files like templates and layouts were unable to be removed during sync.
Calendar “Global” Events were deleted after synchronization.

Security and Administration

Duplicating a contact did not retain a contact’s security setting if it was limited to particular users or teams.
The preference for security was not always retained when creating a contact from a company record.
Customers were unable to register and activate behind a Proxy server.
Some customers were unable to register their Premium software when using a dual access serial number.
Users can backup and restore databases which result in a backup files that is larger than 4 GB.
In some cases, users were unable to create new layouts in 10.0.2.
Setting multiple font settings in preferences caused an error in the application.

Other

ACT! no longer looses focus to other Windows applications when certain actions like looking up a company or scheduling a follow up activity from the clear activity dialogue are performed.
In some cases, setting the default phone format to include area code caused some numbers from the phone number to drop.
Mapping fields to Excel documents in the Documents tab did not work in Excel 2007.

Link to complete liste of changes: Knowledge Base
How to Download and Apply the ACT! by Sage 2008 (10.0.3) Service Pack? Follow this procedure in the KB: Knowledge Base

Be sure to download the good update depending your version of ACT. You’ll find your exact version in "Help » About ACT!" Menu.

Check for updates

Stephen Lemaire — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 09:32:00 +0200

All our addons get an new method to check if there is a new version online. Update your addons now to get this new feature!