Outlook & ACT! integration

Helped a client this morning where the integration between Microsoft Outlook and ACT! kept being lost. I would fix it and it would work that day, then drop the next day. VERY frustrating for both client and I.

With the help of this ACT! KB article: ACT! icons & tabs not appearing in Outlook, we overcame part 1 of the issue, and then with a little scripting I've setup that workstation to keep a known good copy of the ACT! preferences and use that to overwrite the current preferences on each start-up of the workstation - that solved part 2 of the issue.

The ACT! preferences are kept in %appdata%\ACT\Act for Windows\ directory.

Another possible solution is found here: Preference Settings for Word Processor, E-mail, and Customization is Not Retained after Restarting Your Computer - although not helpful for time for me.

Custom layouts with Durkin Toolkit

I've been deploying an ACT! database with custom tables using the Durkin Toolkit.

Although having done this before, I once again found that I'd forgotten to copy the customised forms.

Here is how you get the customised forms (layouts) onto the workstations and laptops using RDB's (Remote Databases) - you need to copy the files from

DatabaseLocation\DatabaseName-database files\Layouts\_Toolkit\

on the server hosting the ACT! database to the same location on the workstation.

Thus if your ACT! database on the server is at D:\Data\ACT\Yourdatabase.pad,

the location would be D:\Data\ACT\Yourdatabase-database files\Layouts\_Toolkit\

and you would copy it to the workstation with the RDB to, for example: C:\ACT\Yourdatabase-database files\Layouts\_Toolkit\

Hoping that helps some of you trying to find where those layouts went...

Scheduling tasks for others

When you schedule a task for others in ACT!, you get a drop-down list of people you have permission to schedule for. No problem, but what about when staff leave?

There are a couple of things to do here but deleting their user record is NOT one of them. Make the user 'inactive' - do not delete them, the reasons why are the subject for another post another time.

However, this means that they are still in the above mentioned list, you can still see them in the list of people you can schedule for.

I've seen some people rename the user from "USERNAME" to "zzUSERNAME" so that the appear at the end of the list, but it's nice to be neater, right? Yes, I'm glad you agree ;-)

In fact it is a really simple solution that works perfectly (thanks to KR for the pointer). You simply edit the user and change their security role from "Standard" (or whatever it was) to "Browse".

They now no longer appear in the list. Now that's neat.

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.

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]

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!!

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.

[Cross-posted to here]

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.