** AVAILABLE AS OF APRIL 17TH, 2023 **
When we acquired the TopLine suite of products back in March 2021, Dash was the crown jewel of the lineup. Dash was the most mature of the three products, with a unique set of features that set it apart from other reporting products of its kind. It was easy to use, flexible, and allowed users to display the data in list view, KPI's (simple and complex), and charts depending on their needs.
What's more, unlike many reporting products, Dash worked right within Act!, so it was always available when and where you needed it.
After we acquired it, our first objective was to make it compatible with the 64-bit version of Act!, which we completed around the time Act! v24 was released. Most of the work in this sprint involved upgrading the programming from VB to C#, which made it easier to troubleshoot, but didn't change the user experience much. Even with this completed, many lingering issues remained. Opportunity reporting was missing the Status field; Activity reporting was broken when Act! removed a stored procedure; it was slow to retrieve History & custom table data, and it was locked under the Dash tab in Act!, meaning users couldn't work with Dash and Act! at the same time.
To address these issues, we had to rewrite Dash completely. The data would have to be accessed through SQL directly, which meant a lot of data mapping. As some may know, Act! is not structured as one big table, but rather many smaller tables that must be pieced together logically to extract the data. This process took one of our top developers months to complete, and there were a few points where we came close to shutting the project down, but we didn't.
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| Settings | Pop-out Dash | Query Builder |
Dash 11 went into internal beta in early March, and it was good. Very good. Data that used to take minutes to refresh now took seconds. The query builder still had the easy-to-use Dash features, but we added some UI changes & helpful buttons to make the process even more intuitive. Suddenly all fields and tables were accessible, and all the drop-down values were available for selection. Even activity reporting was available again.
The only remaining issue was Dash being nested inside of Act!, forcing the user to choose which program they wanted to use - Dash or Act!. So we challenged our developer to undock the Dashboard from Act! so it can be viewed independently of Act!, even on another screen, and he did it. Now your reporting Dash can be viewed & managed on one screen, with all your Act! features & functions available on another.
New Feature list:
- Rewritten from VB to C#. Faster and better memory management.
- Dash data can now be viewed in a separate window from Act, allowing for simultaneous Dash and Act! access.
- No longer uses the problematic OLEDB Views, instead uses the standard SQL tables
- Email a single dash report directly from that panel.
- Activities/Contacts that were broken by Act several versions ago, now work correctly
- Query Builder - The opportunity Status field can now be queried.
- Field selection in Query Builder now has Double Arrows, allowing users to move all fields from all entities at once.
- Query Builder now has dropdowns for open and close parenthesis.
- Printing to Excel now supports XLSX format, rather than just CSV format.
- Query Builder - Add, Delete, and COPY buttons, for easier query building in less time.
- User Interface is modernized across most views.
Dash 11 is scheduled for release on Monday, April 17th, and to thank all our past Dash customers, we will offer them 35% off for two weeks. To be clear, anyone that purchased the TopSuite version of Dash since March 2021 has two weeks to upgrade to Dash 11 for 35% off the list price. Please email
Dash 11 is compatible with all Windows versions of Act!, versions 21 and newer, including Pro and Premium.Dash reports configured with past versions have tested mostly compatible, but the reports' field selections often need to be reset.
* Anyone purchasing Dash 10 this Month will receive an upgrade to v11 free of charge.
