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badgermike

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How to convert ACT!2006 to Office 2007 BCM

Hello,

We want to move over to Microsofts business contact manger from our ACT2006 database. I already converted and imported into BCM however there are a couple of things that didn't work that well. I did read somwhere that BCM only supports ACT2005 conversions or something to that effect. Any I converted over and it Dropped certain ACT records that we would like to keep and also on all the act memos that moved over to bcm....It set the record creator as me (the importer) and it set all the past memo dates to the dates imported. So my question is: Is their a better way to convert an ACT!2006 database over to BCM without losing or compromising so much data?

Thanks
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Mike Lazarus
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badgermike

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Both great answers. ACT to BCM is a nightmare and the other solutions are costly and still lose data in the process. We are a small company(2 sales people and only 2 smaller act databases) so I think I will import all that I can without costly solutions and have the sales department just deal with it.

Thanks!
Mike
Why are you making the move? Maybe the better option is to remain with ACT!?

BCM isn't bad for a personal system, but it's a really poor option for a sales process
Main main issues with ACT! are:

1. It is a resource hog and slows performance.
2. Everytime I do one upgrade to the MS products I have t upgrade ACT to keep functionality - IT will cost me another 1600-1800 dollars for this.
3. BCM comes free with our MS SMB licesens agreement.

I guess it basically is a catch 22 for us:
ACT  8 has more than we need is slow, and doesn't integrate with our ms office 2007 version, and is costly. BCM as I am hearing isn't that great for a sales process, andprobably has too little.

In reality I am not sure what I am going to end up doing - Maybe look for another CRM solution. Either way the sales people will never be happy with their software:)

Re your concerns:
1. This is been significantly improved with ACT! 10. The reason ACT! 7/8 was such a resource hog was it's reliance in Microsoft's .Net 1.1 and SQL 2000. With 9/10 based on .Net 2.0 and SQL 2005, they managed to resolve this
2. If you were using any Microsoft SQL 2000 product and went to Vista, you'd need to do the same. This is not something exclusive to ACT!
3. It's worth that much :-)

An upgrade to ACT! 10 might answer all the issues for the next year or os
Act 10 is still slow and resource intensive.  We went from 2005 Premium to 2008 Premium with zero speed increase.
I kind of had a feeing that it wouldn't  be much better because newer versions of programs are always "have more robust options" which generally always means they are going to use more reasources.....I'm was kind of thinking that GL Computing was an ACT rep.

I ended up ditching ACT!  and not converting to BM in the end. I choose to go the path of least resistance. Since our sales people didn't need much for a separate rep database, I just utilized our Accounting Software (MAS200) ...Aside from the customer divisions we already have  I created a rep division. I then export ed all the act fileds I needed into excel and since our rep database needed a good overhaul anyway we have someone that is going to take all that data and enter it into our accounting software...I was luckily only able to do this because we: have a small company, have pretty much a fixed amount of reps at any given point (half of our records were terminates reps), only need to reference conversations and don't mind scrolling a log and don't need call counters and all the other bells and whistles of ACT!


resourcepc,
the only sites I have seen that have no speed increase with ACT! 10 is if they are running less than 512MB RAM or have a server that's completely over-used with other applications.