Sage Software has announced the availability of the new ACT! by Sage 2008 product family including ACT! by Sage 2008 (10.0), ACT! by Sage Premium 2008 (10.0), and ACT! by Sage Premium for Web 2008 (10.0). New customizable dashboards anchor this year’s product releases, and allow individuals and workgroups to access priority sales opportunity and activity details in a comprehensive graphical view. Additional ACT! 2008 enhancements include editable list views, multiple contact assignments per opportunity, and expanded workgroup security, among others.

This year's ACT! product announcements coincide with the 20th anniversary of ACT!. ACT! established the “Contact Management” software category with its introduction in 1987. Today ACT! is the number-one selling contact and customer management solution and preferred choice of over 2.7 million registered users and over 41,000 additional corporate customers to organize, access and manage their customer information.

“ACT! continues to benefit millions of users, and gain new users, not only due to its core productivity features, but also because it continuously evolves to address new business requirements,” said Joe Bergera, executive vice president and global general manager for Sage CRM Solutions. “Our new dashboards, for example, deliver rich visual analysis capabilities that were once only found in enterprise CRM systems. Now, with ACT!, they are available and affordable for small and mid-size business use.”

ACT! 2008 Product Family
ACT! delivers powerful contact and customer management capabilities that support a full range of desktop, laptop, Web browser and handheld device access methods that can work seamlessly with a centralized database to help individuals, selling teams and corporate workgroups improve productivity and increase sales.

ACT! can be customized for specific business environments and offers turnkey integration with common business applications such as Microsoft® Office, Lotus Notes®, Peachtree by Sage, Sage MAS 90 ERP, Sage MAS 200 ERP, QuickBooks®, and BlackBerry®, Palm OS®, and Pocket PC handheld devices, among others.

ACT! Premium products include all ACT! features and offer sales teams and workgroups additional functionality in the areas of centralized administration, team scheduling, enhanced opportunity tracking, and advanced data security. 

New Dashboard Features
ACT! dashboards provide a comprehensive visual overview of key activities and opportunities on a single screen. Users can set an ACT! dashboard as their startup view to begin each day with a snapshot of activities that require attention, and track their progress against company goals and key performance indicators. The ACT! by Sage dashboard allows users to track their individual activities and opportunities.

The ACT! Premium and ACT! Premium for Web dashboards allow team members to track their individual activities and opportunities, while managers can also track group performance.

Each ACT! dashboard includes six customizable components: Schedule At-a-Glance, My Activities, My Opportunities, Opportunity Pipeline by Stage, Top 10 Opportunities, and Closed Opportunities. Users can hover over charts and graphs to see associated details, or click graphics to take further action on any activity or opportunity. Users can also create new calls, meetings, to-dos, or add additional details to existing opportunities directly from the dashboard. The entire dashboard, or components, can be copied into any application including Microsoft Office applications for use in e-mails, reports, etc.

Managers and administrators can add or remove ACT! dashboard components, change titles or legends, and utilize drag-and-drop functionality with the Dashboard Designer to easily customize any default dashboard or create new dashboard components.

New & Improved End-User Productivity Features
Users can quickly edit fields within a contact, group, or company list view without having to open records individually. Multiple contact assignments per opportunity allow more than one contact to be associated with an opportunity, so all decision makers associated with a sales opportunity can be tracked. Users can also view all contacts or products associated with an opportunity from a list view without having to open the opportunity.

Document shortcuts can be added to activity and history items without having to attach full documents, to help control database size and allow any non-ACT! users to edit documents, while also ensuring the most updated versions are in the database.

An expanded ACT! search capability can perform advanced queries on groups and companies to find specific information more easily. Advanced queries can be saved for later searching and re-defining of search criteria.

New & Improved Workgroup Administration And Security Features
Administrators can control data security by limiting a user’s or team’s access to any group or company record, determine which users can view and/or edit group and company information, and limit access to any new groups and companies created based on pre-set security preferences. Administrators can also temporarily suspend a remote database from synchronizing to the parent database to protect unwanted data or deletions from affecting the parent database, among other new administration features.

Sage Software also announced 63 ACT! Add-on solutions to further extend ACT! with additional functionality including marketing, shipping, mapping and synchronization capabilities.