I know, I know.  Another year, another upgrade.  Upgrades can be expensive both in terms of money and time, but unfortunately they are a necessary evil of the computer world.

Some companies force you to upgrade every year or so.  For example, Intuit’s tax tables will stop working when QuickBooks reaches a certain age, or you’ll no longer be able to access your accounts online in Quicken after a year or two.  Sage takes a different approach with their new releases by trying to entice you to upgrade by offering a bunch of new “must have” features.  And of course, you’ll be forced to upgrade if you change other aspects in your computer world; for example, users of Vista and Office 2007 found that their older versions of ACT simply wouldn’t work.

Quite frankly, ACT 2009 didn’t have a huge “wow” factor, although it did make significant changes in performance.  On the other hand, ACT 2010 has added several cool features that I really like:

• The new Welcome Page includes things like instant access to search and links to your most common tasks.
• The new Web Info tab automatically integrates your contact records with data from all the latest sites including LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google Maps.
• The Opportunities area has been revamped to  behave like contacts, groups, and companies, which means you can add lots of customized fields and change the Opportunity layout.
• There’s now “out-of-the-box” integration with Swift Page’s e-mail and drip marketing solutions.
• There are 9 new dashboards, 13 new reports (created for Sage by Tech Benders!), and a new customizable Reports view.
• iCalendar and vCard compatibility so that you can send invitations and contact information to “non-ACT” users right from ACT.

I’ll be running a series of “Drive Before You Buy” webinars of ACT 2010 throughout August; for more information visit http://techbenders.com/users.php If you decide you want to take advantage of some great pre-release pricing drop me an e-mail at info@techbenders.com.