Access or ACT

[Guest]

My company is considering purchasing ACT for contact management but looks to
me that Access will do the same thing, and we already have Access. One of
the advantages of ACT is that it sends reminders/alarms similar to Outlook.
Anyone have experience in both programs to offer a good comparison? Thank you.

 

[Rick B]

Act is a written contact management system. Access is a development tool
that allows you to build databases. If you are up to the challenge of
writing a contact management system using Access, and if you think you can
incorporate all the features you will need, and if you need more flexibility
than Act offers, it is probably a good choice to go with Access.

If you want a predesigned solution that has had many years of development by
professional software developers, then you will want to use Act.

Price should also be a consideration in your decision, but buying Act will
most likely be much cheaper than spending hundreds of man-hours writing a
unique solution.

 

[Larry Linson]

Access is not a Contact Manager, but it is software in which a Contact
Management application database can be created. The Contact Management
template is far, far less feature rich than commercial programs.

If you already have Microsoft Office Pro, with Access, then you already have
Outlook, which is a Contact Manager -- that would require less development
work to adapt to your needs, I am sure, than implementing a Contact
Management database application in Access.

Yes, you can do a form of automatic notification with Access, but in its
simplest form, it would only notify when you open the CM Database that you
prepare in Access.

Larry Linson
Microsoft Access MVP

 

[Arvin Meyer [MVP]]

If you decide to write your own Contact Manager, I have a sample of a
Tickler (Reminder) application on my website:

http://www.datastrat.com/Download/Birthday2K.zip
--
Arvin Meyer, MCP, MVP
Microsoft Access
Free Access downloads
http://www.datastrat.com
http://www.mvps.org/access

My company is considering purchasing ACT for contact management but looks to
me that Access will do the same thing, and we already have Access. One of
the advantages of ACT is that it sends reminders/alarms similar to Outlook.
Anyone have experience in both programs to offer a good comparison? Thank

you.

 

[Guest]

Along the same lines, at my office I'm trying to talk the PTB into ditching
ACT 8 and strictly using Outlook's BCM however the biggest problem we're
trying to address is tracking: tracking salespeople and sales, main customers
and related customers, record customer contact (conversations, meetings,
proposals, etc) and the different products that they purchase, generate
specific reports that would indicate which salespeople sold what items and
generate reminders/diary items for future dates. I sort of feel like I'm
reinventing the wheel but I can't seem to find a customer database solution
that also offers customized tracking/reports.

I was hoping Access would do that if I managed to figure out how to use it.
I'm not at all familiar with Access so any hints/tips/cheats are incredibly
appreciated!!

While I'm at it, thank you all for contributing - you'll probably never know
how many people you've stopped from pulling out the rest of their hair!

 

[John Welch]

Hi Patsy-
I just finished a custom Access contact tracking application for a search
firm that had previously been using ACT. They called me in because ACT,
being a flat file system, didn't allow them to do the kind of reporting and
cross referencing that they needed to do. The data migration from ACT to
Access was pretty difficult, especially the "notes" info from ACT, which is
their one non flat file feature (multiple notes stored per contact record),
but which is extremely difficult to export correctly. They wanted lots of
features that only a relational system could handle, and Access worked great
for them. They initially tried to do it themselves: the owner of the
business bought a book and tried to 'figure out how to use it' like you
mention. But they soon found that creating something that sophisticated was
way beyond them, and hired me. Including all the data migration, they ended
up spending about $15,000 for about 250 hrs of a professional's time to
create their customized 'dream application'. So those are my thoughts: With
Access, one can design something much more powerful and useful than ACT, but
that's not something a beginner can just 'figure out' without a _LOT_ of
work.
hope this helps
-john

 

[Guest]

Thanks for all the info John - VERY much appreciated and already I'm feeling
less stre$$ed!! Sorry I didn't thank you earlier - the day after my post, my
hard drive crashed (on a 5 month old Compaq!) and I'm now sharing my
husband's computer. 2006 is starting out like a bowl of cherries in a glass
of lemonade - UGH!

The notes part of ACT is the one thing that they're definitely interested in
importing. In my dream, MS BCM has a wonderful notes section and no less than
20 custom "activity" fields which can be tracked and reported on!

Thanks again,
Patsy

 

[TC]

Hey, now we know your charge rate!

TC