Agent Office CRM software

I used, liked and recommended Agent Office for over a decade but it's been a known dead product for over two years, so I have stopped recommending it. The last significant upgrade was Version 9 in July 2006, with a Windows compatibility update to Version 10 in July 2010, and it will not be upgraded again. They do continue to sell it on their site.

Although Emphasys continues to say they "will continue to support it", they have in reality not supported it in any meaningful way since they bought it in Oct 2008. Based on what I have been told by people who have spoken with Emphasys salespeople, Emphasys is promoting Agent Office Personal Edition as the "New Agent Office". That is essentially like saying an apple is the new banana. They have absolutely nothing in common other than both being fruit, or in this case, CRMs. Personal Edition is an Outlook add-on, the fifth of its kind on the market, and they charge monthly for it because it uses an exchange server, but it is essentially a desktop product. It will only work with Outlook 2010 and does not work for a team.

On a side note, two of the five Outlook add-ons, Respond and Eurekaware, have recently gone out of business.

If the original Agent Office breaks, you're stuck unless you can get the one person left who knows a lot about Agent Office, to fix it for you. He is the best support available for Agent Office, but he is often difficult to reach and can be unavailable for days and weeks at a time, even with a support contract in place. The reality is that anyone who uses Agent Office will have to switch to something else sooner or later. Sooner if it breaks down on them. Frankly, waiting until it breaks is not a wise approach. It means much more downtime and anxiety than is necessary. Making a planned transition to something else prior to being forced to in a panic is a much smarter way to go.

There are many other CRMs available that are as good or better than Agent Office that continue to be improved and supported. I am a reseller for about 25 of them. The two that I point most Agent Office users to are http://IXACTContact.GaryDavidHall.com and http://AdvantageXi.GaryDavidHall.com . The former because it is the most comparable to Agent Office with regards to having similar features, easy to learn, easy to use, and automatic sharing of data between it and any kind of device and Outlook. The latter because it imports more data from Agent Office than any other CRM, and because it is does everything you always wished Agent Office would do, and much more, including its own integrated e-mail.