Sends a single message to a contact in act! Ideally used for sending a Text Message (SMS) to a Contact who is already in act! The message details including date and time sent are stored in the contact history of the person you are sending the message to.

Sends a quick message to a contact not in act! Ideally used for sending a message quickly to someone who has not yet been entered into Act! or is unlikely to be entered into your database. The message details including date and time sent are store in the MyRecord of the currently logged on user at the time the message was sent.

The customer header allows you to include your name, your company name, brand, or a advertising message at the beginning or every message just before the body of the message. This assists the receiver in knowing who the message is from if you are using a pooled number service or a virtual number that your message recipients may not be familiar with.

Group Messaging to a current lookup is for those situations where you do not have a static group created in act! for a list of contacts, but you would like to send them a Group Message anyway. The current lookup can be created from simple or advanced lookups and can even involve tagging or un-tagging of records until a final list is achieved in the current lookup. The message will then be sent to all contacts and multiple history records generated for each individual contact of the message including the date and time the message was sent.

Group Messaging to a Group or Sub-Group is where you already have a static group created in act! for a list of contacts and you would like to send them a Group Message. The message will then be sent to all contacts and multiple history records generated for each individual contact of the message including the date and time the message was sent.

Text Messages (SMS) or Picture Messages (MMS) can be recorded via a number of different methods. You can easily record outgoing messages and incoming replies in Notes, History or act! fields. There is also the option to record the last data and time a message was sent in an act! field. Messages recorded can also be marked private if required.

There are cases where you might want to make the recording of text messages and replies private to each user. This option allows you to set message recording for notes and history to private.

Seamless handling of message replies including notifications, chat windows, automatic recording and auto-reply. Text Messages (SMS) & Picture Messages (MMS) can be replied to and you can receive notifications via your browser, emails, pop-ups or chat windows in act! and they can even be automatically recorded.

Message replies are generally recorded against the contact that matched the cell/mobile number of the message reply. What happens if you have duplicates in your database, which one gets the reply? This feature provides a selector that allows you to choose between a list of duplicate contacts or contacts that happen to share the same number.

Automatic replies can be generated when a reply is received in act! and a Text Message (SMS) can be sent using standard text or a message template. It works very much like an auto-responder for an email.

The ability to schedule a group of messages in batch to occur at a specific date and time. If you are going to use Text Messages (SMS) as prompts to doing something such as attend an event, or reminders to take action at a specific point in time, then you will need to be able to schedule these messages to occur at a specific date and time. The scheduling feature provides this capability along with a complete job management system to determine the status of a Message job (SMS Job) along with ability to retain the job details, and also resend the same job at a future point.

Activity Messaging allows you to send messages related to act! activities such as confirmations and reminders for your act! Meetings or Google Appointments. Confirmations can be sent immediately when the activity is scheduled or with a configured delay allowing you time to review. Activity Messaging is available for act! Standard Activity Types as well as Custom Activity Types. There is even a specific Activity Type for Text Messages.

Calendar Messaging allows you to send your Text Messages directly from the act! Calendar as a scheduled text message. We have created a specific Activity Type called 'Text Message' that allows you to schedule a 'Text Message' activity like any other type of activity in act!. Once placed in the act! Calendar the text message will send on the date and time in the calendar and also clear the activity and generate a history item all automatically. The Text Message can also use the activity details as the source of the message or a message template. You can even paste the contents of a message template in the activity details for the message and it will work like any merge message using a message template. This feature also supports act! Activity features such as recurring activities and selecting multiple contacts for the activity.

The Events Messaging feature allows you to set up multiple events messaging jobs that can automatically generate Text Messages on a specified frequency (daily, weekly, monthly) using groups, act! Date fields, or a combination of both. All Event Message jobs have a submission time in advance of the event time so you can set them up for review prior to the messages going out. There are also various send methods based on your own skill level. Prompted will provide you a list or recipients to review prior to sending. Manual will place the message job in the message queue for you to review prior to releasing or running the message job. Immediate can be used once you have reached a level of confidence that the messages jobs you setup can be sent immediately without review. This feature is ideal for any messages that need to be sent 'automatically' on a regular basis to the same group of recipients, a changing group of recipients, or on a particular contact specific date, such as Birthdays, Anniversaries, Subscriptions, Renewals, etc.

The Message Management system called the SMS Manager or SMSEngine is a complete message job management system for both Text Messages (SMS) and Picture Messages (MMS). Messages can be scheduled, queued, paused, held, stopped, removed, repeated, edited and prioritised. The SMS Manager is also a standalone application so it will still be running even when act! is closed. That means those important messages will still be sent even when act! is not available.

The Message Log contains a complete audit trail of all messages sent and received including date and times as well as the user who sent the message and the contact that replied. You can even open the XML file into Excel to do comparisons with your message account, use in cost tracking or accounting, and even legal disputes.

Personalise your messages by including your own act! fields from your database. The Merge Messaging feature allows you to merge in any field from your contact database when you are performing Group Messaging to ensure the message is personalized based on the recipient's contact details and customized based on the additional profile information you have stored in your act! database on your contacts. This means that a canned communication will quickly turn into an SMS conversation almost immediately and your CRM and database marketing efforts will become much more focused and personal.

Customise your messages by creating your own message templates to standardize a message when sending to multiple contacts Obviously, it does not make sense to copy & paste message details to each individual contact in your Merge Messaging jobs. Therefore, you will require the ability to customize your own message templates that includes both act! fields and message text that you can save for later re-use.

Message preview allows you to preview your text message prior to sending. This is ideal if you are using message templates, custom headers, local time at the receiver's end or simply to see how your message will look when it arrives.

Did you know you can send text messages with attachments like you can when sending emails. This is available when using the Multimedia Message Service (MMS). Current file formats supported are image files, vCards and PDF files. This feature is supported by the following message providers:

1) Twilio - www.twilio.com
2) Zipwhip - www.zipwhip.com
3) SMSGlobal - www.smsglobal.com

Support for spanning messages across multiple parts when messages are longer than 160 characters. The Short Message Service (SMS) format only allows for up to 160 characters to be sent in a single Text Message. However, this may not be sufficient to get your message across, particularly if you are doing any Merge Messaging where you may not know how many characters are being merged into you message depending on the recipient’s information in their act! customized fields. Therefore, being able to spread you message across more than one message is often called for. Message spanning (Multi-part Messaging) means that you will still be able to send the complete content of your message, but it will be separated and distributed over multiple messages. Obviously, in this case you will need to consider your message credit as in most cases you will be sending two messages and not one message to each recipient where the messages extends over two parts.

Forward outgoing and incoming messages to other mobile/cell phone numbers or email addresses.

Multiple message account support means that you can have multiple accounts configured that can be selected at message time. This is ideal when messages are being sent for multiple businesses by the same user. It is also useful if an executive assistance or receptionist needs to send messages on behalf of a manager or multiple staff. One other scenario might be where multiple users are sharing the same computer. In this case each user can use their own license on the same machine along with their own message account.

Multimedia Message Service (MMS) means you can send other media with your Text Message, such as images, logos, PDF files, vCards, etc. This feature is supported by the following message providers:

1) Twilio - www.twilio.com
2) Zipwhip - www.zipwhip.com
3) SMSGlobal - www.smsglobal.com

Many SMS users use smiley or grumpy faces to send a message beyond the text message in the form of some basic visual expressions of emotions. These have been taken much further into the space of emoticons, however these are not supported in simple SMS Text Messaging. Therefore, the Smileys are generally comprised of a series of keystrokes (characters) that create a visual image. We have taken a collection of these and would like to make them available to ACT Mobile Messenger users. I would also like the ACT Mobile Messenger user to be able to add their own, and not be lost, as a result of performing an un-install or upgrade of the ACT Mobile Messenger.

Due to the form of the short message service being only 160 characters many users of the service have come up with creative acronyms or abbreviations to get their message across with less keystrokes. We have compiled a list of the most common whilst also removing expletives as any shortcut included with the ACT Mobile Messenger should not be rude or offensive. I would also like the ACT Mobile Messenger user to be able to add their own, and not be lost, as a result of performing an un-install or upgrade of the ACT Mobile Messenger.

There has been some customers reporting that their phone numbers are appearing with the wrong country code. This feature allows you to perform bulk updated to country codes in phone numbers based on Lookups.

The Local Time support feature allows you to specify either the sender's time or the receiver's time when scheduling text messages. This ensures that any text messages you schedule do not arrive on the receiver's phone in the middle of the night. It also means that you can make sure that all recipients of a group message receive the message at the same time based on their local timezone.