ACT OR OUTLOOK

Microsoft Outlook and Act! are both excellent programs for Contact Management, which is why they both deserve being reviewed. Each have strengths and weaknesses and each has different benefits for the user, depending on one's needs. Know too that both are constantly taking ideas from each other and new versions are always outdoing the other, which adds to the fun or frustration however you would like to perceive it. I personally use Outlook so my bent is obviously in that direction. However I recognize that for some businessess, Act is a better fit. Let me show you why.

There are elements of Act which are better suited to some users who:

A) Are in a smaller networked environment that must share information tightly
B) Will not grow significantly
C) Do not require integration with the other Microsoft Office components
D) Require screen layout changes that are to be maintained easily

First, out of the box, Act wins hands-down for it's obvious and intuitive behavior in most cases. It's really simple and clear...you see a contact, and below each contact is a set of tabs which show various transactions pertaining to that contact: Notes/History, Activities, Sales Opportunities, and Library. Each allows you to right-click and add a new transaction or click on the left navigation bar for Groups, Tasks and Calendar entries. What could be possibly wrong with this clean and simple approach? For beginning users of Contact Management it makes sense. This structure appeals to many people because of its simplicity.

Second, Act is a sharable database on your network (with the right licensing). Outlook requires either Small Business Server or some 3rd party add-ins to share information on a network or the internet. The number of users and price per user can help you decide. If you are foreseeing growing your company, networked Outlook is certainly more scalable and a better priced than networked Act. (And read the end about Groove 2007)

Outlook is more object-oriented and appears less intuitive out-of-the-box. Example, it is not obvious that a contact is connected automatically to an email (until you look in the Activities tab of an open contact). Entries and transactions which out-of-the-box appear disconnected are really building blocks towards a more comprehensive view of your contact information. Poetically, Outlook seems more of a flexible fabric, Act more of a pyramid structure.

Act allows built-in Sales Tracking of contacts, Outlook doesn't use sales. However Outlook now has a newer Business Contact Manager (BCM) Update which answers that issue (available free for Office 2003 Professional Edition users)

Act has many great "stock" reports and a rather advanced report writer. Outlook is not oriented to reports as it uses advanced and custom views of data. Reports, however, are part of BCM for Outlook.

I think what I like most about Act is how it allows you to take any field and set it up for drop-downs which can be either editable or not. This can be a great time-saving device for those fields that you wish to keep structured. Outlook cannot do this.

Outlook allows excellent Tracking, Embedding and Linking to external documents. Act does not allow a document to be embedded (which means when Act is backed up, the document won't be backed up). In other words, Act only allows a "view" of a document found elsewhere on the PC or network. Thus, modifying a document (using the Library tab under any contact) is a rather slow and clumsy process.

The flagship feature of Outlook is of course the email engine, completely integrated with Microsoft Windows in every which way. Incoming, Sent, and Deleted emails are all automatically linked and easily viewed, sorted and searched for an Outlook Contact. It's a real tip of the hat when Act allows it's user to use the Outlook Email feature. But Act also chops out many wonderful features that Outlook has built-in when doing simple customizations in the email folders.

And because Outlook seamlessly integrates with the other Microsoft Office products, you can use it with Word (Ezine creation and reporting), Excel (reporting), Publisher, Access and even Powerpoint.

And if you are anticipating that your company is going to grow then Outlook is completely scalable; it's "big brother" is Exchange Server so that your entire organization can use Oultook in a much bigger way, when you want to share contacts, calendars, tasks...and delegate administrative tasks to assistants or Virtual Assistants (VA). And even better, if you want to share contacts and calendar information with your VA you can do so for about $10/mo using Hosted Exchange

There are countless niceties and countless annoyances with each that combined are just part of software programs in general. But I would NOT advise using both. CHOOSE AND STICK WITH ONE OR THE OTHER. Both become instable when using together, Act suffering the greater part of that instability and quirkiness.

The future of both and conclusions
Act has made quite a few changes and its transition from a proprietary database to a far larger-scale adaptation of SQL Server in Act 2005 and 2006 was necessary, brilliant and quite painful. It lost many devoted customers because it had to spend enormous resources moving its core database from one platform onto another and in so doing dropped (Act 2005) many wonderful and important features in its transition (for example Act 2005 was not able to synchronize both directions with a Palm).

Office 2007 (with the new Outlook12) is now even more integrated and focused on data collaboration...sharing of data between users, complete with forms for websites (Sharepoint) and more in-depth administrative features as your organization grows.

About the Author

Paul Wagner, The Software Magician is a contributing writer, teacher, coach, consultant, and radio show host who has taught hundreds of business professionals, entrepreneurs, how to get peace of mind and overcome technical overwhelm by working faster and smarter with their technology and software in day-to-day business. Return to Free Articles Index