Sunday, September 1, 2002

A good ACT! and some bad bull

FIRST LOOK

By David Gewirtz

Diane, our intrepid tipmeister, won't be providing us with one of her wonderful Outlook and Exchange tips this week because her DSL provider apparently went kaput. Instead, I'm filling in with an interesting tip for using Outlook with ACT! and a warning about a dangerous program masquerading as an anti-spam utility. As soon as Diane can get a new broadband connection installed with another provider, she'll be back here bringing you tips and tricks that'll make your day.

How ACT! users stay in sync with Outlook

First, as many of you may know, ACT! 6.0 shipped. ACT! is probably one of the very best known and best regarded contact management products on the market and many of our OutlookPower readers are also users of ACT!. The new version of ACT! is reported to have a number of major improvements in how it interfaces with Outlook. We just got our hands on a copy and will have a more comprehensive report in future weeks.

In the meantime, we've been in regular contact with the nice folks at ACT!, and they provided us with this helpful hint that'll help you keep ACT! and Outlook in sync.

Many of you corporate computer users have Outlook as your company-wide email program. And while Outlook is a good email program, ACT! is arguably considerably better at calendar and contact management. In many companies, we find that some users use the ACT! calendar while others use the Outlook calendar. And sometimes, users of one product need to check the calendars maintained by the other product for availability. If you choose to manage your calendar within ACT! and it isn't in sync with Outlook, you may find yourself double-booked.

Here's a quick tip to help you sync an ACT! calendar with Outlook:

  • Choose Outlook Activities from the ACT! Tools menu.
  • Choose Update to display the Update dialog
  • Choose the middle button, Outlook calendar with ACT! activities
  • Select a Date Range
  • Click Update to begin updating your Outlook calendar with your ACT! activities.

There you go, both products working off the same calendar. Ain't technology grand? By the way, if you want more information on the new version of ACT! or to see a features tour, feel free to visit:

http://www.act.com/products/50/demo/

Program alters your outgoing mail signatures with their own ad

And now, on to some disturbing news from a completely different source. There's a company out there called MailFrontier (not to be confused with the excellent Frontier product I talked about some weeks ago). MailFrontier has a product called Matador that, well, is a lot of bull. This product ostensibly protects you against incoming spam. When you install Matador, the download automatically alters your signature line in Outlook to read: "This mailbox protected from junk email by Matador from MailFrontier Inc."