Sage Software released a new version of Act on Tuesday, a step toward what the company says will now be annual overhauls of its nearly 20-year-old contact management software.

Last year's Act 2005 release marked a major update of the software, which received a complete architectural rewrite centered around Microsoft's .Net platform and SQL database after having gone several years without significant new development. Act 2006, which will begin arriving in retail stores this week, adds a number of user-requested features and helps smooth some of the rough spots associated with the software's transition to a new architecture.

Act 2006's back-end changes include synchronization-system fixes intended to speed up that process and new integration support for IBM's Lotus Notes. The software's interface has been tweaked to allow users to more easily associate contacts with multiple groups or organizations, and to create hyperlinks when linking contacts to customers. The new version also adds support for a feature that Sage's executives say users often request: automatical printing of phone numbers on Act's calendars of scheduled calls and meetings.

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Source : PC World