>> Now, if the program did this especially well, you could understand my 
>> company deciding to use it.
> 
> It used to be all the shizzle ten or twelve years ago. All kinds of 
> stuff interfaced with it, including form letter generation, tickler 
> files, etc. Everyone tried to be compatible with ACT!

I see... I guess that would be why we have licenses for it then!

>> The program keeps a local database in some undocumented proprietry 
>> format. 
> 
> According to wikipedia, it's MS SQL Server. Are you running a recent 
> version, or the Win 3.1 version? :-)

The version we have is pretty old. It definitely does NOT use SQL 
Server! It uses flat files. And I don't see any Sage branding either...

>> Yes, you heard me correctly. In the year 2008, people are trying to 
>> manually synchronise seperate databases by sending diffs back and 
>> forth by email. 
> 
> Kind of makes sense if you think about traveling salesmen with 
> disconnected laptops adding new contacts that other people don't really 
> need to see promptly.  Needing to manually import the stuff seems kind 
> of odd.

Well, Microsoft Outlook seems to manage to do all this just fine without 
any special action on the user's part. You're out on the road, you read 
the local copy of your mailbox, you send out a few replies (obviously 
they don't "go" anywhere yet), compose new emails, note down new client 
contacts, etc. When you get back to the office, you connect, and Outlook 
somehow manages to automatically synchronise your local mailbox with the 
server copy - and even lets you continue working while it's doing it! It 
also never "corrupts the database" if you try to do operations in "the 
wrong order".

Why the hell can't ACT do any of this?? And given that it can't, why 
don't we just use the existing contact-sharing features already in 
Outlook???

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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