We are pleased to report that a workaround has been found for the recent integration issues with Outlook 2016. For those unfamiliar with the issues, Microsoft released an update to Outlook 2016 on June 13^th (Office v16.0.8201) which impacted the Act! integration in three ways:

1.       Act! would crash when clicking on an email address within an email field in Act!, or merging to email using a template or the merge-mail function

2.       Act!-Outlook Contact and Calendar Sync ceased to work

3.       Outlook was not available to select as a default email client within the Act! Preferences

4.       The Act.Outlook.Service failed to start

Initially the short term fix involved rolling back the Outlook update to Office v16.0.4229, but many IT professionals were hesitant to do so with a security update. Keystroke offered a combination of Act4outlook and a free Qmail solution to resolve the issues created with this Outlook update, but many still wanted the native integration to work.

Last night Swiftpage announced to the consultant community that they found a possible workaround that restores the Outlook functionality to Act!, and addresses all four issues listed above.

It appears that outlooks' latest update (16.0.8201.2102) introduced a file called “adal.dll” which collided with a pre-existing file which Act! relies on for operations such as conversion (ie, Act! 6 to v19 upgrade). Since “conversion” is a less frequently used part of act!, a short term solution would to simply rename our adal.dll to something else.

This has fixed all of our outlook breaking issues we have tested thus far, and most Act! consultants around the world have confirmed same. I personally did so last night on my laptop.

As some people are nervous about searching for, and renaming DLL’s, we have created a little utility that will do it for you.  Unzip the file and then run the Rename Adal Utility.exe file :

https://kqc.sharefile.com/d-s3a18986f9e54eea9

Swiftpage has taken steps with Microsoft to avoid these kind of service disruptions in the future, as well as commit to addressing the long-standing MAPI integration limitations in the near future. As always, Act4outlook remains a solid alternative to MAPI integration, while providing significantly enhanced Act!-Outlook functionality to our customers.

To learn more about Act4outlook, please click HERE.