Last week Microsoft started deploying its October 2018 update (called version 1809) for its Windows 10 operating system.  Since then there have been reports of people losing some or all their personal files during the upgrade process.  Here is a good summary of the issue from Engadget: https://www.engadget.com/2018/10/05/windows-10-october-update-1809-delete-data-wipe-user-profile/ That article describes a tool and a setting normally not used or needed except in large corporations or

20 years ago, I went out on a limb, cut the cord with corporate America and started our company. It's been fun, and at times, pretty much an up hill journey with some years being better than others. But we are still here thanks to a really wonderful staff of people holding us up alive and well. It's our customers that have made us successful.  And our vendors and products.  We have written products people love.  We support products people love.  One product in particular is

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

This month we're doing another of our Reese's Southern Wisdom blog posts. The timing is actually perfect.  August is a favorite month for travel, family vacations and just getting out of town. For people, that's a good thing. For sales, not so much. With customers not picking up the phone to call for sales or services, a business needs to find a way to bring in revenues during a slow period. Many people are quick to send out email blasts, trusting their computers to do the work of

While working with a client recently I described the basic underlying strategy for a CRM (customer relationship management) process.  He had chatted with several different companies and he remarked that he got paragraph after paragraph of descriptions. However, he said mine was the simplest and one that he felt he could repeat to his sales staff. These were powerful words to me and reinforced what I have felt is a really simple message. Set up a process, implement it, do it every day,

Recently I posted a Youtube video about the integration of Act! and Quotewerks. I'm including a link to it below. After I sent out a Tweet about the video I got back quite a few interesting comments but one in particular inspired this blog post. This follower liked the video and said that the Act! and Quotewerks integration was a perfect Q2C or Quote to Cash software application. To be honest, I had never heard of that acronym so I went and, of course, Googled it. Don't you think Google needs

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

Version 20.1 has resolved many of the Outlook and Act integration issues. Some residual side affects may still exist and after the update you may notice the Act addins do not show up in Outlook. Here's a fix for that: Close both Act and Outlook. Open a secure Command Prompt (right click on the Command button and choose Run as Administrator - or in Windows 10 choose Start Command Prompt - Admin) Change to the folder where Act is installed (cd "C:\Program Files (x86)\ACT\Act for Windows") Type