Thursday, December 18, 2008

Security on crackberries

Just reading this article at CSO on the dangers of using mobile devices and it specifically mentions the John McCain incident:

...officials with John McCain's campaign mistakenly sold a Blackberry to a Fox television reporter for US$20 in a fire sale...

News like this makes me glad that the most of our clients that use either Blackberries or Windows Mobile devices are using Handheld Contact (aka HHC) to sync their data to their handheld.

HHC_Erase_Date I AM GLAD because Handheld Contact has an option on the server side to "Erase data from handheld" which will erase all data sent to the handheld by HHC which is all the contact info for all the contacts.

If a client loses their Blackberry, all it takes is a phone call to their system admin (or me), a couple of mouse clicks and a large chunk of sensitive information is removed from the Blackberry.

[cross-posted to here]

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

ACT! 11 Google Plugin

Here is a link to the ACT! 11 Google Plug in. It allows you to have a tab in ACT! that shows the google map location based on the information in the address fields for the contact you are on.

Click here to download

The file is actually called a Contact Context Web Browser. Much easier to call it the Google plug in as that is it's most useful incarnation. However, it can be used for taking any field of data from with in ACT! and parsing (merge) it into a URL and then having the results come back into a tab.

An example of this is where we have a client that has a web based system for managing their orders. We have been able to display the clients orders from this system on each contact in ACT!. I should do a video of this so you can see what I mean. If someone requests it in the comments I'll do that for you.

One last point, there are some other templates in the Contact Context Browser. The only other one I use other than Google Maps is the Linked In one. Very handy for those that are Linked In!!

Thursday, December 11, 2008

Wildcard searching Lookups

I often find I want to find someone or a company in ACT!, however I can only remember part of their name - wildcard searching to the rescue.

If I do a company lookup for "outback", I only get returned a list of companies that begin with "outback".

However, if I do a company lookup for "%outback" - note the percent sign prefixing the search term, I get a list of all companies that contain the word "outback".

This is quite useful and can be used on any of the fields, not just the company field.

Friday, December 5, 2008

ACT! Reports published to Excel

At the recent ACT! by Sage conference at Coolum. Ben Lederer showed us how to add Microsoft Excel as an output option for reports.  It involves a small registry change. The knowledge base article #14690. See it here

It also adds output as Tiff and HTML as other options.

You will find though that the standard reports in ACT! are not particularly useful as it embeds all the content of the report into excel. This includes images and other text and formatting that you probably don't want if your purpose is to perform calculations in the spreadsheets that you create. You'll see what I mean.

If you want to perform calculations on report data I'd recommend making very simple purpose built reports with no formatting