ACT! is a common contact management software product used by
salespeople to manage contacts, companies, opportunities, activities,
etc. I'm wondering if either of the last two versions--ACT! 6.0 (2004)
or the new ACT! 2005--has features to allow custom many-to-many
relationships to be defined.

Specifically, I want to associate companies with other companies, and
people to other people, and I want to have multiple person-to-company
relationships. Examples of custom company-to-company relationships
would be supplier/buyer, parent/subsidiary, or in my case,
investor/investee. (I'll be using ACT! to track hundreds of venture
capital firms and their portfolio companies; most companies have
multiple VCs and most VCs have multiple portfolio companies.)

Another thing I want to do is track "referred by" relationships among
different people that I prospect to, and track board of director
relationships between VC partners and portfolio companies.

Is this possible?

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Clarification of Question by mcmatt_from_golden-ga on 08 Jul 2005 17:42 PDT

One other note--I'm not a user of ACT! who wants to know how to do
this. I've never used ACT!, and I'm thinking of purchasing it; but if
it doesn't support these relationships, I'll create my own sales
database using MS Access. Doing that would take longer, so if ACT!
does support custom many-to-many relationships, I'll just buy it and
save myself from reinventing the wheel. Thanks.

While this is not a feature of ACT! "out of the box", it is possible
to do this with an add-on. You might contact Geoff Blood at
www.tnhg.com as I think he has done this with ACT!.

Regards,
Mike Lazarus
GL Computing, Aust
www.GLComputing.com.au