Upgrading to ACT! ver. 7 or 8?

March 29, 2006 9:09 AM

Is it worth moving to either version 7.0 or 8.0 of the contact/sales management software ACT!?

I quit upgrading ACT! at version 5.03 (aka ACT! 2000) as by all reports version 6 was lousy. And while ACT! 5 meets my needs, I'm running into the typical issues common to all obsolescent software. Has anyone any experience and counsel on the newer (7.x) or newest (8.0) versions of ACT!? Thanks.

posted by mojohand to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

I have very little experience with prior versions of ACT, but now I'm using ACT 2005 (which is v7.0, I believe) and its a resource *HOG*. Apparently ACT 7.0 was a total rewrite to .NET and MS SQL. With a database of only 700 or so contacts, ACT and MSSQL regularly consume 200-300MB of RAM. The app is sluggish even on newer machines with 2GB of RAM.

I just use ACT (mandated by my employer, BTW) for simple contact management and to-do/call lists. It does this, of course, but we've been completely unable to build custom reports that yield the kind of sales tracking and forecasting information we're looking for. The "what's new in v8.0" does seem to address some of our functional complaints, but I'm betting it's still a bloated hulk.

Without knowing what you use ACT for, I'd say don't "upgrade" unless you absolutely have to and explore other options first.
posted by turbodog at 10:58 AM on March 29, 2006