Act! Compatibility with Windows 10

Posted on by stephen

Microsoft has released Windows 10 on July 29th 2015.  Here are some considerations before your upgrade.

This article is updated thru October 1st 2015.

Summary:

  • Windows 10 will be officially supported by, and the main focus of, Act! v18.
  • Act! Premium for Web doesn’t work well in the new Internet Explorer Edge browser, but standard IE 10 is included with Windows 10 and works normally.  This is promised to be fixed in v18.
  • Act! v16, Sage ACT 2013, and all prior versions are highly unlikely to ever get a Windows 10 compatibility update.
    • Note:  these versions can be installed in Win 10, and run, but have cryptic errors that won’t be resolved.  Such errors include the documents tab, and an error message every time you close the program.
    • You can install these versions at your own risk.  They are functional, but far from perfect.

Known Issues:

These issues will likely be fixed when Swiftpage rolls out their official Windows 10 support update.  This list is collected from various user reports, is not necessarily consistent with every installation.

Some users have reported that:

  • “Object reference not set to instance of an object” upon Act! close.  Message can be dismissed. — FIXED in latest HotFixes
  • required to manually start SQL Server ACT7 instance after a reboot.
  • Act! will open the phone info dialog when launching the program
  • Act! crashes when opening a document — Microsoft Interop Word error — FIXED: apply latest v17.2 HF 0 HotFix
  • An RPC Server error appears when attaching documents to a contact — FIXED: follow steps in KB 38199

Several of these errors do have associated knowledgebase articles that can repair them.  But they are listed here as sometimes not working right “out of the box.”

For Best Results:

Act! v17.2 seems to work well when it is a “clean” install, on a new copy of Windows 10.  If you are upgrading from a previous version of Windows or previous version of Act!, these glitches seem more common.

If you purchase a new computer that has Windows 10 pre-installed, you should be able to install Act! v17.2 fresh, apply HotFix 0, and run it fine with no issues!