About five years ago we released the first version of Act4outlook in response to Microsoft breaking the native Outlook integration with Act!. The truth is they broke Outlook integration with a lot of products, but with Act! this change was causing Act! to crash after users updated their Office. As you might guess, Act4outlook was immensely popular at the time, and remains so to this day. Over the years we've come out with six different versions, with the last one updated to support the new 64-bit version of Act!. It is not an exaggeration to say Act4outlook has become the highest-selling Act! addon of all time, with over 8000 licenses sold over the years.

Rest assured, Act4outlook still includes superfast incoming & outcoming History recording; bi-directional copying of contacts, activities, & tasks; support for creating contacts & activities from emails, as well as the ability to create lookups in Act! from one or more emails.

This new version we're about to release, namely Act4outloook v7, is the fruit of many customer requests and is the biggest feature improvement in the product's history. Here is a breakdown of what will be added to Act4outlook v7:

1. One-way Contact sync: The user will be able to set a direction for contacts to be pushed, from Act! to Outlook or Outlook to Act!, and this new version will implement these pushes on a scheduled basis. Unlike Act!, our addon currently has the ability to push one or more contacts manually in either direction, so a user simply sets the direction they'd like contacts to be pushed automatically, and they can easily push the other way manually.
   We expect this feature to be useful for people who need their phone contacts updated regularly for Bluetooth calls from the car
2. One-way Calendar sync: Much like the Contact sync described above, the user can set a direction to push activities automatically and leave the rest for manual pushes. We expect this feature to be great for people who create appointments or accept invites on their phone, or those who need their personal calendar to reflect their Act! calendar, as well.
3. One-way push buttons for both:  If you are new to Act! and you want to create an Act! database from your Outlook, Act4outlook makes it easy. There are now on-demand push buttons to move your contacts and/or calendar from Outlook to Act!.
4. History Suppression: the ability to suppress History recording when sending emails to specific domains (currently this is only supported with inbound emails)
5. No matching contact alert: add a popup if the email address you are sending to is not in the database, and then present an option to create that new contact or attach to a different one.
6. Activity type selection: When creating an activity from email, we've added a preference to set a specific activity type (currently it defaults to Call)
7. Location field visibility: When creating an activity from email, the Location field is currently greyed out unless "Schedule Meeting in Outlook" is selected. This option will be enabled by default now.
8. Activity Attachments: When creating an activity from an email, you can now attach the email to the activity (including any attachments on the email).

For good luck, we've scheduled the beta release of Act4outlook v7 for Friday the 13th. If the testing goes well, we expect the commercial release to be on Tuesday, January 24th, and available for online purchase HERE.

Earlier versions of Act4outlook will remain available for download at www.act4work.com, but commercially we'll keep with past practice, and discontinue selling them on our websites in favour of the new version. Despite the many improvements, there will be no increase in price for this new version of Act4outlook, as it will remain at $39.95 USD per seat. Please click HERE to learn more about Act4outlook.