Years later, while not perfect, ACT by Symantec was more or less doing the trick for me, although I did have trouble with duplicates and I had to have someone go through the database every 6 months or so simply because of the over 20% movement in the various industries I work within.

along came Sage and bought up ACT. I upgraded based on the 1001 promises that the program would be more integrated and have better functions. 3 months later, I had a frozen database and the folks at Sage wanted $300 to try and rescue it, but wouldn’t make promises.

I gave up and have been using Outlook, which doesn’t do 90% of what I want it to do. Keyowrd search helps somewhat, but I think I have had numerous oopotunities fall between the cracks.

Flash forward to ACT 2010 and after importing this, that and the other thing, I created a data base f around 5,000 names, many of which are only names, or may have an email address. LinkedIn has overwritten Outlook. FaceBook doesn’t integrate and I currently have 67 entires for Paul Jackson, which I suspect may actually be 3 different people named Paul Jackson. But which of the myriad emails is correct and which of the 17 companies is current?

ACT tipped me off to a consultant who was happy to charge $150 per hour to do $12 an hour intern work for me. However, nobody has been able to explain any process for getting it all to work together. It would be nice to not have to go through 5,000 names in my droid trying to figure out what’s what.

There is a new product I have heard that may help us both. It’s called 3 X 5 index cards and a pencil with an eraser.

If anybody can come to Connie’s aid, I can use some help too. Misery doesn’t always love company, but I thought you might like to know you are far from alone here.

–j.s.