ACT! Groups - Outlook Categories Synchronization

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ACT-Outlook Synchronizer provides users with a very innovative way of mapping ACT! Groups to Outlook Categories. And it keeps them Synchronized!!!


To activate ACT! Group to Categories synchronization, enable it in the Options tab.
ACT! Group Membership Issues
ACT-Outlook Synchronizer will synchronize the ACT! group membership for a contact when it updates that contact in Outlook. For example, if some data in the contact like address, name, title is changed, the contact is then updated in Outlook and all the group membership from ACT! is brought over. However, if you add a contact to a group through the group interface, ACT! does not change the modification date for the contact (or the group) and ACT-Outlook Synchronizer does not know that the contact should be updated in Outlook. There are two ways to deal with this:

1.

You can go back to the contact and change something in the contact so that when synchronization occurs, the group membership is transferred over.

2.

You can enable the Force ACT! Groups Table Synchronization option and all the group memberships are updated in Outlook. Unfortunately, the update is fairly slow so use this option only when you have made modifications to the group data and you want to update the category settings in Outlook. The group data update is done last in the synchronization process.

Another issue with ACT! Groups is the removal of the last member from an ACT! group from the Outlook Categories. For example, you remove a contact from a particular category, namely Personalcrm. Sales. ACT-Outlook Synchronizer will remove this contact from the Personalcrm->Sales group in ACT!. However, if that contact is the only contact in that group or subgroup, it will not be removed from the group membership. The reason for this is that a bug in the ACT! database interface causes it to crash if you remove the last member of a group or subgroup. Hence, you will have to remove the membership manually in ACT!.

Outlook Categories Issues
Outlook Categories do not have the concept of sub-categories within the same category. Hence, our definition of the dot (.) and the category-subcategory separator. Hence, dots in the category's name since it will be considered a group separator and subgroups will be created in ACT!. Only use dots when you want to create sub-categories/sub-groups.

Changes in the Outlook contact's categories are brought over to ACT! during a normal synchronization.

Setting an ACT! Contact's Group Membership when first created
You can automatically set a Group Membership to a contact when first imported from Outlook by checking the Set Group Membership to Selected Group option in the Synchronization Options Tab. Make sure that you pre-select a group in the Groups/Lookup Tab so that the proper group membership is set. So when new Outlook contacts are brought over, the proper group membership is set for those contacts. Also, when the automatic group membership is set in ACT!, the Outlook contact's Categories is updated with the group membership is ACT!.

Group Names
Any group names in ACT! may not have a comma (,) or a period (.). Any group in ACT! that has these characters is ignored.