We recently repaired a corrupted Act database for a client. In fact, 
it’s the SECOND time we’ve repaired his database. Needless to say he was not a happy camper, although he was thrilled to get ALL of his data back safe and sound. Needless to say, we wanted to make sure this never happens again so we questioned him on a few common Act database corruption “gotchas”
- Do you perform weekly maintenance?
- Do you have large amounts of activities that you frequently fail to clear?
- Have you deleted a user and “reassigned” their activities to another user?
- Do you use recurring activities and either use the automatic rollover feature and/or sync those activities to another platform like Google, Outlook or iCal?
The client was doing his maintenance religiously and clearing his activities. He was making former users “inactive” rather than just deleting them. However he was creating quite a few recurring activities and synching them to this GMail calendar.
If you are creating recurring Act! activities and attempting to synch them to another product I would change that behavior to avoid additional problems. This is not a result of a deficiency in ACT! but rather that ACT!’s activities are much more powerful than the other products and can’t be translated 100%. When you schedule a recurring activity in Act! it very cleverly shows you only the most recent activity; unfortunately most other calendaring products lack this sophistication and don’t know how to handle these “cached” activities.
You’ll probably find this shocking but I encourage my staff and clients to avoid Activities whenever possible. We use them only for actual calendar appointments. We concentrate on the use of “processes” combined with Opportunities and Dynamic Groups. This not only takes the burden off of the activities but insures that “nothing falls through the cracks” of the database.
If you would like help in taming your Act Activities and/or exploring the safest ways to synch Act with your Google calendar give the Act Consultants at Tech Benders a call!
