Act! Quick Tip: Saving Key Web Pages to Your Act! Contacts…
Being that it has been more than 2 months since we have had an Act! specific topic – I thought it was about time!
We do a fair amount of training for companies that know that training is an absolute key ingredient in keeping their people happy, productive, and up-to-date. One of the tidbits we share about Act! that is consistently an ‘uknown’ (but greatly appreciated) is the ability to save a web page to a contact record.
After Act! has been installed on your system, you will find that there is a new entry on the Tools menu of Internet Explorer (sorry Firefox and Chrome – this is Explorer only territory!) – “Attach Web Page to Act! contact…” (For that matter, depending upon how you have IE configured, you will likely also see a new tool icon in the toolbar – hover with that mouse to find it!)
Click this, and you will be presented with a dialog box the looks pretty much like the one you see when you save inbound emails from Outlook.
Act! will have already selected the current contact and you can add as many more contacts as you want. Click OK, and each and every contact in your selection list will have a link in their history to a copy of the web page.
Simple, right? Yup.
A couple of things about this:
1) If you select more than one contact – only one copy of the page is actually saved to your Act! database.
This is good, saves space.
Keep in mind though, should you delete it from one contact, you delete it from all! Act! will warn you of this, but the message may not be clear.
2) A copy of the page is saved to your computer. This means a couple of rather cool things:
a) If you are not currently on the web and need to see the page, you can – after all – it is saved in your database!
b) Since the file is saved to your PC, it is a snapshot in time. Even if the ‘live’ website goes down or the page is changed, you still know what it looked like the day you saved it. (Just like any Act! history, it is time and date stamped along with the name of the Act! user who saved it.)
c) If you use syncrhonization and your Act! is set up to sync attached files, everyone – even your remote people – will be able to check it out (as long as they have rights to view the contact it was attached to that is).
One last little tip about saving web pages to your Act! contacts:
After awhile, you may end up with many pages saved and/or you may attach pages to contacts that have a great deal of history.
This can make finding the pages more difficult.
If you want to be able to use the Act! keyword search to find your attached pages, after you attach a page, re-open the history/attachment from the History on the contact and add some applicable keywords or description about the page in the details. The keyword search reads the details but not the attachment or regarding fields, so you need to give the search engine a little to go one in finding your web pages.
Be well!
M Scott Schaffernoth, ACC
blogger@winnovative.com
