Replace ACT! (was Looking for Some Advice)

brian lists at karas.net
Tue May 27 11:27:12 EDT 2003


This is a home-grown project.  What I am doing right now is having one
of the office admins do an ACT! export every morning to a samba share on
my linux server.  I clean up the tab-delimited export file and pop the
rows into a MySQL database.

We use the data for the ticket system (which I also wrote, as part of
the same project) and related info.  The medium-term goal is to get off
of act entirely, but the sales guys *might* continue to use it for
contact management.  

Our case might be somewhat unique, act is/was being used for trouble
ticket management (add customer to a "Trouble Ticket" group when they
have an outstanding support issue (ugh!)) and billing (very very ugly). 
Basically, nobody here knew anything about anything other than ACT, and
so it was contorted into inhumane uses.  Now that I have an independent
ticketing system, I am working on writing a billing system (we are a
wholesale ISP, selling services to partners who then install for their
customers, we handle all billing and pay various commissions (based on
many criteria including moon phases).

After all this, the contact management portion should be "easy".  I want
the sales people to use my system vs. ACT, so we can elegantly track all
customer contacts and total customer/partner acquisition costs.

One day I hope to put the whole thing up on freshmeat as an ISP/IT
department admin tool.  There is also a knowledge base portion where you
can uploads docs to the server via a browser, and add descriptions to
the docs.  This in turn is used to provide some self-help info for new
trouble tickets (most of which are auto-created from incoming emails). 
There is also an IP-address manager portion that auto-assigns
IPs/subnets based on the SLA/contract for a given customer/site.  Next
is to write a portion that builds the T1 and DSL router config scripts,
and the required config lines needed for our Cisco routers, after that
I'll add SNMP router provisioning as well.  The system also manages
RADIUS account info for our re-sale dialups (if anyone needs some cheap
dial-up, contact me offlist :) )  And there is also an inventory manager
portion to track our installed equipment in our co/lo facilities (if
anyone needs cheap co/lo, contact me offlist :) ) as well as connection
diagrams, and auto-troubleshooting of circuit/server problems.

I know that is probably 99% useless information to you, just thought I'd
put it all out there.  Bottom line is that it's a home-grown alternative
to ACT that is less contact-management oriented.

Thanks for reading (if you got this far ;) )  If anyone is interested in
a demo, I might try to show up to the next meeting and can show some
stuff...

On Tue, 2003-05-27 at 11:07, Greg Rundlett wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-05-27 at 09:44, brian wrote:
> access corporate ACT database (which I am converting into a web/MySQL
>  application)
> 
> Really?  Is it homegrown, or can I get it on Freshmeat?
> 
> There are a lot of projects on Freshmeat for contact management, and
> over 3,000 when searching for the term 'act'.  I am interested in
> finding a leading solution for ACT!-like programs on Linux.
> 
> If anyone wants to go so far, I would love to have a side-by-side
> comparison of proprietary v. free CRM tools at FREePHILE.com





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