Users Facing Problems with Act!

Act! CRM Crashes Frequently!

Crashes, freezes & the calendar integration with Outlook does not work properly

The issue of Act! crashing has been raised by many users in the recent times. This issue has provoked many updates and fixes have been provided by CRM experts, yet the problems related to crashing and freezing of the software has been found the time and again, mainly when using Act! on a Windows 10 computer. This issue was experienced mostly by people using version 16 or version 17.1 or 17.2 of Act! Pro or Act! Premium. The fact which is noteworthy here is that many complaints received by Act! from its user regarding this problem, came in late January this year. This is when Microsoft released an update for .NET Framework.

The obvious reason that can be associated to Act! not working or crashing on PCs with windows 10 can be the compatibility issue, however, this issue has been raised by people using windows 7 as well when they have upgraded a certain feature of their windows. The common complaint that has been registered by people, is that Act! stopped working when trying to use the Documents tab, open history attachments, or when trying to attach a file to a note after running Windows updates. The main cause that CRM experts have identified related to this crashing and freezing of Act! is that, on January 26, 2016, Microsoft released an update for the Microsoft .NET Framework which updated Microsoft .NET to version 4.6.1. This update has been known to cause issues when trying to interact with the Documents tab, modify attachments, or attach new files to the database.

In order to deal with these issues Act! provided its users with QFE (Quick Fix Engineering) updates or generally referred to as hotfix. These hotfixes were necessary because the systems using Act! were live and currently running. Releasing a statement regarding the issue Act! said,

“Upgrading to Windows® 10 introduces many new features, some of which may affect Act!. We highly recommend performing a complete backup of your Act! database prior to upgrading to Windows®, through Act! v17.2 and later are compatible and are fully supported. We have additional recommendations to make your transition as smooth as possible. Act! crashes when attempting to attach any document to the contact using the documents tab or when attaching any document to a note. Additionally Act! crashes when attempting to open an existing attachment in the History tab.”

Providing its users with a new version of this software just to deal with some bugs would have been counterproductive for the organization itself, but still Act! provided its users who were using Act! v17.0 or older versions of the software with solutions to deal with this issue. The problem was that these solutions were not reliable solutions as Act! itself stated that

“The information below is provided as a convenience. The steps below are meant to attempt to work around the issue on versions of Act! which are not supported on Windows 10 and have been known to resolve the issue on some computers, however it is not guaranteed that they will work.”

With these types of solutions and because of the entire issue Act! is expected to lose many of its potential customers which can be provided to be harmful for the organization as a whole.

As expected the crashing issue wasn’t resolved this time either, and many of Act!’s users continued to crash when trying to access their Documents tab. This resulted in many users posting on their forums, for a solution. Evidently, when customers are not provided to correctly even after countless updates and purchases, then there is bound to be an outburst as seen here: http://kb.Act.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/38199

Upon further investigation, it was also found out that it was not just the Documents tab that was responsible for the crashing,  but attempting to attach files within Notes, Histories, and Act!ivities would do the same. Thus, anyone facing this problem couldn’t just choose to “avoid” it, as it had spread to the entirety of the program. In fact, using the Act! itself had become an impossible task due to this error, and it was quite baffling that a real fix was not being rolled out. After this issue erupted, Act! released yet another Hotfix, titled,“Act! v17.2”, and stated,

“This issue has been resolved in Act! v17.2 with the release of the Windows 10 document tab fix (Hotfix 0)”.

The problematic part still existed, and it was that there was no such fix for Act! 16 or below, which meant that any user using the older version would have absolutely no control over the program and would constantly crash, whether they used Windows 10, or Windows 7. There has been no such announcement confirming the fix for the older versions of Act!, which means that any user on the older version will have to upgrade to Act! 17, if they still want to be able to retain its functions.

Thus, the only real “solution” provided to Act! 16 users was not to upgrade to Windows 10, otherwise they would be locked out of the program in its entirety. The issue was quite lazily handled and stands out as being a very poor effort on part of their development team. Not only did they not ensure that Act! was compatible with Windows 10, but they also take a lot of time, in releasing a hotfix to address the issue, and even when they did, they locked out a very huge proportion of their user base, by not rolling the fix out to older versions of the Act! program.