Question:
How does the Outlook Email Integration Work as of Act! v22.1 Update 4?
Product:
Product Family: Act!
Version: 22.1 and above
Deployment: Desktop, web and Cloud
NOTE: If you are currently using Act! v22.1 Updates 1-3, please make sure to apply v22.1 Update 4 as this significantly improves the add-in and removes the "Act! is loading your address book" message.
Answer:
If you have configured Act! to integrate with Microsoft Outlook, you will have noticed a new Act! tab in Outlook.
Much of the functionality will be familiar to you if you have used the email integration in the past. For more information on the specific functions available, please see the article How to use Microsoft Outlook as your e-mail client in Act! version 22.1 and later
With the Update 4 Outlook add-in, the address book is not stored within Outlook itself, but instead pulled from Act! dynamically via the API and located within the Act! tab in both the main Outlook menu, and within the compose email window.
If you wished to send an email to an Act! contact directly from Outlook, you can easily do this now by composing a new email, clicking the Act! tab, and then clicking the Address Book option. The first 100 results will be pulled from your database alphabetically, and the rest of the results will be paginated to increase performance. You also have the ability to search by name, email, company and group which will search all of your contacts in your database.
Other enhancements with update 4 include:
- Contact Picker - When using the address book to attach emails to contacts or to send emails, the contact picker dialog box now includes contact, email and company columns to easily identify the correct contact.
- History Recording - When automatically recording History, contact matches are now made on both of the default email address fields (E-mail and Personal E-mail), not just the primary email address.
- History Recording for Individual Emails - When composing an email, the Act! tab now gives options to override the default record History option for that individual email.
- Attach to Contact - When choosing to record multiple emails against one contact record, you can now highlight several emails in your Outlook list and attach them all at the same time.