A client of mine called me last week concerned about some of his information showing up on a competitor's blog. When we looked at the article, it was very apparent that entire paragraphs had been copied and used in the blog. This indeed was plagerism and he called me for advice on his next steps. My client started blogging at my suggestion and I've been giving him advice on how to properly blog, including blogging etiquette. Playing nice, asking permission, and insuring that he also cited his

So you have a copy of our Duplicate Remover Wizard Expert for Act! and have set out to manage/reduce the duplicate contacts or companies in your Act! data base.  You run the program and it finds a good set of duplicates and you set the program to merging the records.  All indications are progress is being made.  Then, the next thing you see is this: The screen that then comes up appears to be filled with messages like this. Working on Fred Flintstone 8/31/2012

I wrote this blog post a while ago and thanks to a request from a reader, I am updating it to be reflective of what is available now in ACT v16.  I have highlighted in RED the new features. We get this question so often I thought I'd post a blog article showing the main differences.  ACT for Windows has more options because it runs on the Windows platform.  The web version, being accessed via a browser will have limitations because of the browser interface.  Quite a bit of

CRM. We have all heard that term by now. To many it means having a process in place to manage customer relationships. To others it is a tool. To me, it's all of the above. But before you can define what CRM means to you, you need to have an end goal in mind. What is the end result you want to accomplish. Are you small business trying to get new customers? Are you a large organization wanting to reach out to existing clients to improve the relationship you have with them? Are you suffering from

One of our favorite reporting tools for ACT and SQL is Stonefield Query.  They have issued a new release. In this release: 1. Stonefield Query is compatible with the new Act! 2014 Service Pack 1 (16.1). 2. A new chart type is now available: Donut, which is similar to Pie but with a hole in the middle. 3. New fields "Activity User ID", "Activity User Name", and "Is Organizer Record" have been added to the Company Activity, Contact Activity, Group Activity, and Opportunity Activity tables

Quotewerks has released 4.9.7 of their software Since October 1, 2013, there have been 16 QuoteWerks updates released containing over 145 new featurs.  We love Quotewerks and whenever they come out with an update it's always full of improvements.  The integration with ACT is seamless and makes creating opportunities a snap. Nice new features are a scripting language, undo/redo on multiple levels, a dashboard, Google contacts as a source for Contacts, and an active

ACT has a new eMarketing product.  This feature has been added to ACT v16 Service Pack 1.  It has an easy-to-use template editor so you don't have to be a graphics wizard to product nice looking marketing campaigns.   You can create, send, and track professional campaigns that reach customers and prospects with the right message at the right time, and know who to follow up with first with intelligent, prioritized Call Lists– all from within Act.  NOTE: this feature is only

It's been another week of intensive Excel projects and once again I used several tricks I've learned over the years.  It occurred to me that they would make a good short blog article.  Here is one of the techniques.  I'll post another blog article soon with more ideas. Working with Dates. I am often helping clients convert data that's been given to them by vendors or trade shows.  Sometimes the dates come over all jammed together without slashes or in text mode.  To