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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).

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.

HotFix 10.0.2.1

Stephen Lemaire — Thu, 15 May 2008 18:31:00 +0200

Here are the main issues who are fixed :

Data fields do not always refresh after performing a contact lookup. This causes data to be saved incorrectly when moving through contacts.
File Synchronization Performance (Provide an 83% file sync performance enhancement)
Synchronization Time-out occurs if Subscription list has been modifiedRestoring a Sync Remote database does not properly set the SQL Server Database Options

You'll be able to download this hotfix and find all the fixes here

ACT! 10.0.2 Available

Xavier Nyssen — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 12:01:00 +0200

Sage just released the new update for ACT! This service pack contains several bug fixes and some new features.

Like this release enables one–to–many custom sub-entity creation (only via the SDK), database schema will be updated. So all users in a workgroup must be on the same version to access and take advantage of the new release.

In this brand new release, we shall retain especially the creation of new sub-entities via the SDK as the main improvement. This feature provides interesting new way to store informations about your contacts.

Main bug fixes and improvements:

Corrected performance issue on the contact list where a user sorts by clicking on the column heading
In previous releases performing a Group or Company Lookup in the Advanced Query dialog, followed by a second Group or Company lookup created unexpected results by displaying a previously viewed Group. This no longer occurs and the appropriate Group or Company is displayed.
Fixed loss of details issue when an activity was rescheduled from the scheduling conflict dialog. This problem no longer occurs and details are retained when rescheduled.
In past releases, after adding two ACT! databases as Outlook address books, users were unable to delete either one. This has been corrected and users can delete unnecessary address books as needed.
Initial user filter settings were set to all users in the default opportunity dashboard components instead of just the logged-in user, in previous releases. This is no longer the case and the logged-in user is set by default for opportunity dashboard components.
Added intelligence to distinguish backups from different databases. In past releases, ACT! didn’t distinguish between backups created from different databases and would only maintain a total number of backups as set in the scheduler preference. Now the total number of backups are maintained per database.
Fixed data type issue in sync which displayed the error “Synchronization has failed. Server Error Description: Error converting data type int to tinyint. Contact your administrator for assistance.” Release changes in how some internal ID’s are stored so that this error no longer appears and sync works correctly.

Link to complete list of changes: Knowledge Base

How to Download and Apply the ACT! by Sage 2008 (10.0.2) Service Pack? Follow this procedure in the KB: Knowledge Base

Update still not available via the "Help » ACT! Update…" menu. Be sure to download the good update depending your version of ACT. You’ll find your exact version in "Help » About ACT!" Menu. Have a look at the second line of this print-screen.

The "English (Europe)" is the version in this example.

New interactive video for ACT Addons

Xavier Nyssen — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 12:52:00 +0100

I just created a new kind of video, more interactive than former ones. I began with that one of the UrWithout demonstration...

Go to the UrWithout page, click on the picture to see the video. Use arrows on the player to continue the video.

What are you thinking about this new video? Is it a good idea? Must I have do the same for others ACT! Addons?

Please, leave us your comments about that.