Is your Act! database teeming with duplicate records and outdated information?  When you send a mailing, do you have to spend time cleaning up addresses?  Do you have high bounce rates on marketing emails? If so, you are not alone.  Below are the most compelling reasons to clean up your Act! database. Accurate information: A clean CRM database ensures that customer information is accurate, up-to-date, and complete. This can help businesses make informed decisions and provide

We get this question a lot, so I thought it would be a good idea to document it here. You have several options with Act! Premium. You can self-host your database - which is what is called Act! Premium for Web, or you can pay to host your database "in the cloud." In this article, I'm just going to cover security precautions we recommend for clients running Act! Premium for Web and allowing Internet access to their Act! database.  If you are using Act! Premium for Web solely inside your

Compromised password emails abound these days. I'm sure you've seen them..."your account has been compromised...I know your password...send money." Many of my clients ask how could this happen? Well, data breaches are dismayingly common.  If you've been using the same password for multiple website/services, you are at risk personally and in your business. Here are some good tips that you've probably heard before: never re-use passwords don't use common passwords such as "password" and

This week we helped a client recover from a data loss.  However, it was not without some pain.  The data was not being backed up correctly so we had to restore from a really old backup copy. Responding to another question regarding data restoration, someone asked if deleted records could be recovered. The answer was yes but with a caveat.  There had to be a good working backup that contained the data that was deleted.  If the data had not been backed up then it could not be

You have probably been hearing quite a bit about GDPR - the European General Data Protection Regulation. What you may not realize is if you have European contacts that you interact with and store their data, you need to understand how that can potentially impact you via heavy fines. The biggest point of GDPR is protection of personal data - at a much deeper level than is practiced in the US. An individual is in control of their data - not the other way around, even to the point where they should

Recently, we have had several frantic calls from customers needing to restore contacts in Act! after a user has unwittingly deleted them. Unfortunately, in some cases, these clients haven't had a recent backup of their Act! Database to pull the deleted contacts from. Don't let this happen to you. Follow these guidelines to protect your Act! data: Limit user security to ONLY what the user NEEDS to do their job. It is a misconception that users need to be "administrators" in Act!. The

We have a great tool that I had my programmer write years ago. It's called Duplicate Remover Expert for Act. We sell a lot of this nifty product. I had a client call me recently, told me they loved the program, but were very frustrated that they always seemed to have duplicates. He also wanted some tips on finding those duplicates that the normal internal process didn't detect. After giving him my answers, I realized they needed to be in a blog post and this is that article. First off, there