How to trick Act into differentiating contacts?

[Nanook1231]

I am using Act 10 for Real Estate. I doubt that matters, but just for the record.

I have several clients that are investors that have quite a few properties that I am working on selling for them. The problem that I am having is that I want to track each of these properties separately so I have entered in a new contact for each of the properties but Act seems to treat them all as one.

Let me give an example so you can follow better. Joe Investor has 3 properties, 100 Main St., 101 Main St., and 102 Main St. Currently I have 3 contacts in my db and all 3 have Joe Investor as the Contact, but in my seller property fields one of them has all the info for 100 main, in another there is all the info for 101 main and in the 3rd there is all the info for 102 main. The problem is that when I send an e-mail or do any other activity about 101 main it wants to put that info in all 3. If I put it in all 3 and then try to remove it from the others when I remove it from 1 it removes it from all of them. I want to track this info separately so I need to find a way to trick Act into thinking they are different contacts.

Anyone have a good idea of how to trick Act into doing what I want it to do? What are the fields that would need to be different to make act think it is a new contact?

Thanks in advance,

Alan

 

[GLComputing]

Is it just email? What other activities?

If just email, what email client?
What steps do you take to send the email?

What build of ACT! (from Help | about)?

Regards,
Mike Lazarus
ACT! Evangelist
GL Computing, Aust

http://www.GLComputing.com.au

http://glcomputing.blogspot.com/

Join the LinkedIN ACT! Fanatics Group

http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/49896

 

[Nanook1231]

I had not noticed this before so I tried it with a todo and a meeting. Did not get the same results with those as I do with e-mail so I guess it is just e-mail.

I am using MS Outlook 2003 (11.5608.5606)

Build is: ACT! for Real Estate Version 10.0.1.199

Alan

 

[GLComputing]

The issue is that when you send an email with Outlook, it looks for the email address for the contact to attach the history to and finds all of them.

You can manually correct each by opening the history item and removing the other contacts from the With field.

You could always try using the ACT! Email client linked to Outlook instead of Outlook directly. It's not as nice, but it would know about the contact rather than having to look for the contact by an email address search

While I don't think this will help this, you should probably update to 10.02 - it does improve a few things:

http://www.act.com/support/updates/index.cfm?show_downloads=true&product=11&version=1&locale=6

Regards,
Mike Lazarus
ACT! Evangelist
GL Computing, Aust

http://www.GLComputing.com.au

http://glcomputing.blogspot.com/

Join the LinkedIN ACT! Fanatics Group

http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/49896