[Hidden-tech] ACT! vs. SalesForce

Maria Trombly maria at tromblyltd.com
Wed Sep 24 12:57:15 EDT 2008


I use Dabble for everything -- dabbledb.com -- which is a paid, hosted
relational database platform.

But you have to design your own database -- fields, relationships, etc... --
and you can't program actions. Though you can very easily generate Web forms
for entering data. I love this part of it.

I've also played around with Zoho CRM a little bit, but we never really used
it.

- Maria

On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 11:24 AM, Don Lesser <dlesser at ptraining.com> wrote:

>   ** Be sure to fill out the survey/skills inventory in the member's area.
>   ** If you did, we all thank you.
>
>
>
>  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)
>
> dlesser at 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
>
>
>  ------------------------------
>
> * LOVE is the Renewable Resource ***
>
> *DAVID  FRANKLIN  FARKAS*
>
> www.HouseHealing.com <http://www.househealing.com/>
>
> www.YourChocolateHeaven.com <http://www.yourchocolateheaven.com/>
>  ------------------------------
>
> * How can they say my life is not a success?
>  Have I not, for more than sixty years, got
>  enough to eat and escaped being eaten?
>                                               ~ Logan P. Smith*
> *
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-- 
-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Maria Trombly | TROMBLY LTD
Covering Asian securities, payments and technology for the world's top trade
magazines
Work: 413-323-4356 | Cell: 413-559-9055 | maria at tromblyltd.com
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