Broadcasting using ACT 3.8 and WinFax 8.2/3

Sheila Williams

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Mar 23, 1998, 3:00:00 AM3/23/98

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Hello,

I just completed building a 16,000 contact listing, in ACT! 3.08. I
would now like to broadcast a fax message using WinFax 8.2 to each
contact. I have a Multi-line Modem installed on the computer.

Question, has anyone on this list had any experience broadcasting to
this number or higher clients? Did you experience any problems? Will
WinFax 8.2 or 8.3 allow the use of the multi-line features of this
modem to speed the faxing up? If so, has anyone had any experience
doing this? Most of my clients are out of state, will this pose any
problems? Except for the fact that my telephone bill will look like the
national debt.

I would really like to know the pro's and con's to doing this. Thanks
in advance for any help provided.

(REMOVE "ZZ" FROM ADDRESS)
------------
Sheila
PLEASE NO UNSOLICITED E-MAIL
don...@ZZiinet.com

Anthonie Benson\Symantec

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Mar 24, 1998, 3:00:00 AM3/24/98

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Sheila,

My suggestion is that you do this a few contacts at the time
A group of 300 contacts to start and see what happens.
You can create a lookup of all the contacts that were send a Fax by looking at the Letter Date in
the Status tab of Act.
or you update a field in Act using the Edit | Replace feature so that you can keep track of who
you send the documentation to.

Running a mail merge is very resource intensive.
You should not have a problem getting it across to WinFax

I am not sure if WinFax work OK with Modem but if it works with WinFax there should be no reason
why it should not work when running the mail merge.

Let us know if you have any more questions.

--
Anthonie Benson/Symantec Corporation
Check to following Act web sites:
Symantec's Knowledgebase for Act:
http://service.symantec.com/act.html
Symantec's FTP site for Act:
ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/products/act

Kevin Chieff

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Mar 27, 1998, 3:00:00 AM3/27/98

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Check out OptiFax, at http://www.optisales.com. They mention
broadcasting via Win Fax Pro 8.01 (note the 8.01).

Marie

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Apr 2, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/2/98

to Sheila Williams

Sheila, I have a couple of suggestions for you:

1. You might want to try using a fax broadcast service like Concord
Services. That way, you call an 800 #, send your contact list at once and
pay a certain amt per minute of actual broadcast time. No money/time spent
on re-dialing busy signals, wrong numbers etc. You'll get an exception
report that will tell you exactly which numbers didn't go through.
2. Unless you are utilizing a fax broadcast service, you'll have to dial
all those numbers one at a time.
3. I have not had any luck w/fax broadcast mailmerged documents. As you
know, when Act mailmerges, the individual letters actually are included in
one document that can be printed. For regular printing, that's not a
problem but for faxing - how does winfax know which letter goes with which
fax number? If you've got a solution to this dilemma, please let me know -
I haven't been able to find a way to 'fax broadcast' documents w/merged
info.
4. If you are using fax broadcast services, you'll probably need to break
your big group in to smaller groups. Winfax allows two different ways of
doing this:
1. You can use the Act phonebook and the current lookup, but it
can't be over 100 contacts.
2. You can set up your own phonebooks and have up to 500 contacs
per group.
5. If you're going to be doing this kind of thing often, have you looked
into Internet faxing? I haven't done anything with it, but it might be a
little cheaper.

Best Regards,

M. Daniels