Back on April 15th, Act! Advantage launched with nine new online applications—ranging from web forms and interactive quotes to appointment scheduling, surveys, event management, website chat, email list verification, a portal, and a URL shortener. But what many didn’t realize was that a tenth application was quietly in the works: project management.
Unlike the others, this tool required a complete rebuild to support multi-regional, multi-language scalability, and centralized updates. After several months of focused development and testing, it’s now nearly feature-complete and officially included in the July 29th update (APC25_13).
What Is Project Management?
At its core, project management is about planning and executing work to achieve specific goals within a set timeframe and budget. It’s often simplified as “planning to get things done—and then doing them.” To make this process easier to understand, we break it down into five key questions:
- What is the goal, and what steps are needed to reach it?
- Who is the project for, and who’s involved?
- When does each phase and task start and finish?
- Work refers to the actual execution, tracking progress, and adapting to changes.
- Wrap-up is the final delivery and closure of the project.
How It Works in Act!
The new Project Management module includes tasks, a Gantt-style schedule, participants, goals, obstacles, comments, and a timeline. A built-in wizard walks users through project setup, making it easy to get started. For those managing similar projects, importing from an existing one is also an option.
Integration with Act! happens on two levels. First, participants can be pulled directly from your Act! database. Second, all project phases and tasks are captured within an Opportunity, where related activities, notes, and timelines are stored—ensuring seamless data flow between planning and execution.Whether you're a seasoned project manager or just getting started, you'll find the structure intuitive and the tools easy to use.
What’s Next?
We recently hosted a webinar on July 24th to showcase these new features (recording available https://vimeo.com/1104233117). Looking ahead, we plan to enhance the module further with features like customer share links, a project overview dashboard, Excel and PDA export/import support, advanced task filters, and drag-and-drop task sorting.
Best of all, Project Management is now included at no extra cost in the top two tiers of Act! Advantage, adding tremendous value to an already powerful CRM suite.
