Windows 7

I upgraded my laptop and workstation server to Windows 7 over the weekend and it went pretty well.  The server was a smooth upgrade as it natively started with Vista but the laptop was originally loaded with XP and the went to Vista so I had to nuke and pave and start over on that one.  Make sure you back everything up first, including Outlook so you can get your data back after the upgrade!

New Windows 7 OS is fast and easier to use than Vista, kind of like XP on steroids.  Here’s a tip:  when you open programs they show up in the Task Bar which is adjacent to the Start button, so don’t pin the programs as short-cuts to the taskbar as well since it get’s confusing.  I just pin the programs to the Start Menu and now when something is in the Task Bar area I know it’s because a program is actually open.  Try it, you’ll see what I mean.  Before you just had shortcuts in the task bar and open programs showed up somewhere further over to the left.

PF

Why Choose ACT!

ACT is a proven market leader with 2.8 million users worldwide and is the #1 selling Contact and Customer and has been for over 20 years.  ACT! was designed for and highly recommended by small businesses and salespeople and leads the industry with its ease of use.  It can be highly customized and is affordable now and into the future and works with a variety of business solutions including Outlook, QuickBooks, Excel and has a plethora of add-ons from 3rd party vendors. 

Coordinate the efforts of your team and have visibility into whats been done, what’s on the horizon and sales to date!  Manage relationships, do key word searches, be more productive, market effectively, sell more and measure results — ACT! does all of this and more.  You can even run ACT! on your laptop and sync and go and continue to use the database offline and also sync it with your favorite SmartPhone device.

The beauty of ACT! is that you can run it locally to save on monthly hosting fees associated with other solutions like SalesForce and Microsoft CRM Online, and you can even enable web access to your own database instead of relying on a hosting partner.  So you have a choice with ACT! as to how you want to deploy your shared database and how to access it as well.  If you want to have it hosted you can do that as well. 

With ACT! you get to decide what’s right for your business instead of someone else telling you that you have to choose between hosted or on-premise solutions and cannot have the best of both worlds.  You can blend access methods using the same database and the competition simply cannot do this and they cost a lot more as well.

ACT! is easier to implement and is less expensive to deploy than MSCRM or SalesForce

ACT! is cool because I can self host it and port forward to sync from my laptop at a lower cost than MSCRM or SalesForce. I also use QuickBooks link on the Server so I don’t have to enter contacts twice. Then I use Tapi.IT and C3IP and love the click and dial and History logging with VOIP service. From there I scan business cards with Scan.IT and print Labels and Stamps with Dymo. Also using Scan and Organize to view all files from within ACT to keep everyone tied back to Contacts and of course SwiftPage and integrating it with my website and to track interest and follow-up. All of this functionality that is relatively straight forward to implement and of course Snap-In tools as needed to keep things moving forward. Now you can also create new tables, dashboards and manage drip marketing. This is fun!