"Our customer surveys have told us that our users spend an average of six hours a day in ACT! With ACT! being such an essential part of our users' workday, it was critical that we enabled integration with the tools our customers use on a daily basis such as e-mail, Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat and the Internet," said Greg Head, general manager of ACT!, Best Software. "In addition, over the last year we have announced new products that enable integration with PDAs, ACT! for Palm OS, ACT! Link 2 for Palm OS and ACT! Link for Pocket PC and accounting products such as QuickBooks Pro/Premier and Peachtree Accounting. By providing integration between ACT! contact data and other applications and devices, we are giving our customers the ability to leverage contact management to its fullest and benefit from having all of the data they need linked to the relevant contact record."

The ACT! e-mail client has been completely upgraded. Users can use the new ACT! e-mail as a standalone client or integrate with and view Outlook, Outlook Express, SMTP/POP3 (Internet Mail) and Lotus Notes e-mail folders from within ACT!. Users can set up multiple accounts and view them all from within ACT!. Because tracking the history of e-mail correspondence is a critical part of contact management, there are three history options that are available when sending e-mail from either ACT! e-mail or Outlook. In addition to traditional e-mail history options such as including the subject line only in the notes section or attaching the full e-mail to the contact record, users now have the option to attach the subject plus the text of the message in the notes section. This option is especially useful to corporate customers with large workgroups working from a single database.

Additional new e-mail features include the ability to send and receive HTML e-mails from within ACT!, the ability to instantly add new contacts to any ACT! database, and the ability to access both ACT! and Outlook address books, regardless of the application in which the user is currently working.

"There are so many of the new features in ACT! that our business has been able to take advantage of such as Outlook integration, Active Libraries and the Internet services," said David Hartmann, director of information technology at Montgomery & Graham, Inc. "But one of our favorite features is the calendar pop-ups. Although simple in concept, there are no other programs that do this, including Outlook. Advanced scheduling is the backbone of our business and the quick calendar pop-ups give us all the details we need in seconds, saving us valuable time which is money in our business."

In addition to the new e-mail client and Outlook integration, there is a long list of features:

• Active Libraries - From the Library Tab, users can directly attach Microsoft Word / Excel / PowerPoint / MapPoint documents, Adobe Acrobat documents (PDF), JPG files and BMP files to the contact record and view them from within that contact record, without launching a separate application. In addition, these documents can be edited from that view using all of the native Microsoft Office toolbars and then saved or printed.
  
  
• Excel Integration - Using an Excel document that has been attached to the Library Tab, users can map fields from their database to fields in Excel for simple and efficient quoting. One quote sheet template can easily be attached to all the contacts in the database for quick updating and quote generation.
  
  
• Contact Activity Look-ups - This data mining feature enables users to gain insight into the customers and activities in their database with a just a few clicks. Users can perform a contact activity look-up to uncover which customers they have contacted recently, as well as which ones have not been contacted in a specified time frame. From the look-up they can schedule follow-up activities, send an e-mail or derive a call list.
  
  
• Annual Event Tracking - Another data mining feature, Annual Event Tracking enables users to specify any date fields in their database as annual events. By doing this, users can manage their events such as birthdays, anniversaries, and policy renewals with a simple annual event look-up. This gives users advance notice of the event so they have time to react appropriately, such as sending a birthday greeting in advance of the event date.
  
  
• Enhanced Internet Services - Now, users can access Web sites from within ACT! using the built-in Internet Browser and attach relevant Web pages to one or more contacts. The pages are saved as offline Web pages so users can access the information even when they are not connected, or when the page is no longer available online.
  
  
• HTML E-mail Templates - ACT! ships with 10 HTML e-mail templates for everything from birthdays to e-newsletters to order confirmations. Using the new mail-merge wizard users can correspond with their customers in a professional and efficient manner.

"Active Libraries is a great example of how ACT! allows us to multi-task programs without having to go back and forth between two or three. The fact that ACT! integrates with all of the tools my team uses every day and that these tools can all be accessed without ever leaving ACT! is what makes it invaluable to us. There isn't anything you can't do with it!," said Hartmann.