Sometimes upgrading to the latest version of a software product can be a big mistake. That's the situation one reader found herself in when she upgraded to Act! 2005, the contact management program now owned by Best Software.
"I have used the previous three versions of Act," the reader wrote. "When the new version was released, I waited a few months before upgrading, as I always do, hoping the bug fixes would be done. I guess I didn't wait long enough."
After upgrading to the 2005 (7.0) version of the software, the reader began experiencing a number of problems. "The newest version is slower than molasses -- even on a P4, dual processor, with one GB of RAM, with 35 GB of available hard drive space that I regularly defragment, on a system that is spyware and virus free," the reader wrote. "If you leave the software open ... overnight, say ... it does not respond when you try to use it. You must kill the program, and you must kill SQL Server as well, to restart the software."
The reader also found one fuction to be missing in the new version. "Act 6.0 did a two-way sync with a Palm," she wrote. "Version 7 can only send to the Palm, so if you add something to the Palm during the day, it does not get picked up in Act. This was not disclosed prior to purchase. I assume that a patch will eventually come out to fix this, but we're still awaiting it."
Hoping it would contain some of the patches she needed, the reader downloaded the 7.01 release of the software, with disastrous results. "Afterwards, Act would not open at all, so I lost the ability to get to my contacts and schedules," she wrote. "But Best Software said they only provide 30 days of support after purchase of the upgrade. I was told to contact an independent Act consultant - at $100-plus an hour - even though it was their update that caused the problem. My only resolution was to do a System Restore with the back-up, which resulted in the loss of some data. Why should I pay premium dollars for a product that does not work, then have to pay for assistance?"
So Best best clean up its Act, or it will soon be out at least one customer. "I would like to go back to Act 6.0, but the database has been changed so you cannot export it back to the previous version," the reader wrote. "I requested that Best add that as a 'new feature' - the ability to export to prior versions of Act -- but I doubt they will ever do that. I am seriously considering exporting to text, painful though that would be, and moving my data to Outlook Business Contact Manager."
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