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ACT! Integration

Symantec's ACT! is the most popular contact management software in the US. H&A staff who have a lot of client contacts use it. They found it frustrating, when they had laboriously created a database full of names and addresses, to have to type those same names and addresses in Word every time they wanted to send a letter to one of their contacts.

During the course of writing Lisa's Macros, I found out that Symantec had an SDK (Software Development Kit) for ACT!, with which I could programmatically talk to ACT! from Word. I used this ability to provide three major points of connection:

• Whenever a user creates any new standard document that requires an addressee, I check whether ACT! is running. If it is, I ask the user whether they'd like to address the document to the currently selected ACT! contact. If they answer Yes, I pull in the current contact's data and use it to address the document and that's that, no effort on the user's part whatsoever.
   
• ACT! allows the user to track their history with each contact. Clicking my tool creates a "history entry" in the current ACT! contact's record, based on the document they have on screen.
   
• Similarly, ACT! allows the user to keep notes about each contact. Clicking my tool creates a note in the current ACT! contact's record, using the text that is currently selected.