Canmore's Blog

Why Act! ist stupid

One of my users is the leading scientist of a project funded by the European Union. He "absolutely needed" a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. And (surprise, surprise) someone already had told him "the solution": Act! by Sage software (in Germany, you might order it from Amazon.de, for example).

Now, upon looking at this software, I decided it was actually a piece of very expensive crap (the distributors he had chosen would charge us 700 EUR for 5 licences...). Let me outline the facts:

• Act! is able to sync all kinds of textual contact data, such as address and phone number. You may even attach e-mails to a certain contact, such as the contact's correspondence. However, Act! is unable to sync attachments, such as documents or images. It does sync the hardlinks to these documents, which are of course unavailable on other computers.
• Act! needs to be installed and run under accounts endowed with admin rights.
• Act! is neither able to store data in the user's profile nor able to backup to network shares via SMB or (S)FTP.
• The sync protocol is (of course) purely proprietary and (of course) there are only Windows versions of the software. Some of the project's participants use Apple Macs, but who cares?
• Act! is able to sync via mail (just like Kolab). These mails are unencrypted, because Act! doesn't allow secure connections to mail servers and is unable to use things like GnuPG.

There are several other stupid details, which are just relevant for my department, so I won't bother you with them. So, what's the the bottom line of this? Well, it has taken me 4 (four!) weeks to convince my superiors of these facts. My solution is straightforward: Use Thunderbird with SyncKolab in conjunction with a mailing list every participant is subscribed to, and you're done. Congratulations, you just saved 700 EUR.

Note: Aethera, a Personal Information Management (PIM) software is also very promising. In the near future, I should have enough time to conduct some tests...