[Hidden-tech] ACT! vs. SalesForce

[Don Lesser]

My two cents:

 

ACT, since 6.0 has declined steadily in its usability and stability. I
recently received a check for $35 as my share of a settlement for a suit
that someone brought against ACT 2005 for not delivering the promised
features. I have one client in ACT 2007 who has problems with it. (Birthday
fields do not refresh-you are always looking at the birthday of the previous
contact you viewed, even though the correct birthday is in the record). ACT
promised that the new version will fix the problem, but wants to charge them
full price for each copy to fix an acknowledged bug.  It locks down the MSDB
engine, making backup of the SQL versions hard (at least it used to). I got
the impression that the newest owners were trying to upsell you to their
higher end version by providing the minimal support needed to keep current
ACT customers from leaving. 

 

I used Goldmine for one client, but was not very happy with it. It has a lot
of fans, so I think that if you take the time to learn it, you'll like it.
ACT, through 6.0, was so easy to use, set up, customize, and link to with an
SDK that I think I became spoiled. Microsoft's offerings are either Business
Contact Manager for non-Exchange offices or CRM 3.0 for large organizations.
The Business Contact Manager package won't work if you do have Exchange and
CRM 3.0 is aimed at large corporations and I never wanted to take the time
to work with it. (It's not that I am so Microsoft-centric that I have to
have an MS solution; I get all MS software "free" as part of my paid
Certified Partnership with them, so I tend to look at their stuff first.)
Business Contact Manager is a free download for any Outlook user and
installs into Outlook, if you want to look at that.

 

I implemented SUGAR CRM for one client. I found that, if you are willing to
do some PHP programming, you can do whatever you want. However, the
documentation implied that you could easily convert a group of LEADS to
CONTACTS and COMPANIES (Sugar keeps these separate from leads and when you
convert a lead to a contact, you need to create/link it to a Company
record). You cannot-you must do it one record at a time. I also found the
reporting and display not very flexible unless you were willing to modify
the forms using PHP. My Sugar contact apologized for the error, but with
2,000 leads already entered, I was pretty disgusted. Since they had been
modified, it was not practical to simply recreate the database. My own
fault, I suppose, for not testing it more extensively before deploying. 

 

I like the idea of a hosted web program, especially for a geographically
diverse group of salespeople or for cross platform compatibility, but for my
own office, I bought a program that would extract my existing ACT data into
an Access database, then spent about 5 hours tweaking the resulting database
so that I could use it for new contacts, notes, and opportunities. We do
scheduling in Exchange and I have to copy and paste the e-mail address from
the ACT.mdb to Outlook, but when I get some time, I'll import the e-mail
addresses from the database into Exchange and make it a public address book.
It is not perfect, but it works for our needs and since the data is in
Access, I have complete control over it. 

 

I haven't used Sales Force and the people I know who do are part of a large
organization. For me, the issue with open source is that you have to be able
to and want to get into the guts of the app if you want to modify it more
than casually and you have to do it with a minimal amount of documentation
and support. That limits something like Sugar for me, although if you are
comfortable with PHP/MySQL, it makes it a good business opportunity to sell
and customize for a client. That's part of a larger question about open
source, I suppose.

 

Don Lesser

Pioneer Training, Inc.

139B Damon Road, Suite 2

Northampton, MA 01060

(413) 387-1040 / (413) 536-1030

(413) 586-0545 (fax)

 <mailto:dlesser at ptraining.com> dlesser at ptraining.com

 <http://www.ptraining.com> www.ptraining.com

 

From: hidden-discuss-bounces at lists.hidden-tech.net
[mailto:hidden-discuss-bounces at lists.hidden-tech.net] On Behalf Of DAVID F.
FARKAS
Sent: Monday, September 22, 2008 12:35 AM
To: Hidden-discuss at lists.hidden-tech.net
Subject: [Hidden-tech] ACT! vs. SalesForce

 

Hi folks...

I'm wondering if any of you can either compare or share your strong
preferences for one of these two CRM solutions: ACT! software or
SalesForce.com online (the free minimalist solution.)

If you have experience with SalesForce, have you tried the integration with
GoogleApps?

Anything you can give me will be helpful. Thanx!
Blissings,
Da/\id




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