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CNET editors' rating:
4.0 stars
Excellent
Detailed editors' rating - Average user rating: 2.5 stars out of 12 reviews
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Product summary
The good: Easy to use; now incorporates Crystal Reports; includes good documentation; links out to popular accounting software.
The bad: Expensive live phone tech support.
The bottom line: Maximizer is one of the most full-featured contact managers we've seen, suitable for growing small businesses that also need customer relationship management tools.
CNET editors' review
- Reviewed on: 02/16/2005
- Released on: 02/01/2004
The monthly calendar view supplies details at a glance.
The Maximizer interface is easy to comprehend. The major sections--My Work Day, listing your current tasks and appointments; Calendar for scheduling tasks, including printing to paper Franklin Planners and DayRunner organizer formats; Address Book for maintaining contacts; Hotlist for targeting your best prospects; Email for accessing Outlook; Company Library for closing a sale with the latest presentation and market info; Personal; and OrderDesk for invoicing sales--are all listed along with their icons on the left and include multiple means of access, via a menu option, a button bar option, or a right-click.Maximizer 8.0 provides numerous improvements over previous releases, including its ability to export Maximizer Address Book entries directly into Outlook. But Maximizer 8.0 surpasses Act Premium for Workgroups with its native ability to track and close sales in greater depth. For example, Maximizer might aid a sales employee for a clothing manufacturer who needs day-to-day involvement with customers. Within Maximizer's Opportunities screen, that salesperson could tag each new lead with a sales prospect ("doubtful," "very good," and so on). Maximizer's Company Library feature keeps handy documents that will help make the sale, including price lists and images to attach to a Web site or a brochure. The Maximizer OrderDesk then finishes the sale, letting the salesperson fill out an order form or an inquiry--complete with address, item codes, and comments--for electronic forwarding to the appropriate departments, including the merchandise warehouse.
The daily, weekly, and monthly calendar views in Maximizer 8.0 have also been revised to hold more information drawn from other modules in the contact manager so that tasks, appointments, even conference room scheduling is possible. There's also an accounting add-on for Intuit QuickBooks that allows users of both apps to view vendor and customer info. Transactions in Maximizer 8.0 automatically sync with the appropriate QuickBooks data file, allowing a salesperson, for example, to electronically send her order to a number of appropriate departments, including accounting, sales, and inventory, at the same time. Act Premium 2005 integrates with Peachtree Accounting instead of QuickBooks.
Maximizer 8.0 includes Crystal Reports, from Business Objects, which lets you quickly and effectively design professional-looking documents.
Maximizer 8.0's most significant change, however, is its replacement of ReportSmith, from Strategic Reporting Systems, with the superior and more versatile Crystal Reports from Business Objects. For example, a real estate agent could use Crystal Reports to generate comparative pie charts detailing the resale value of homes in different local areas for his customers, or a sales manager could turn out graphs comparing wholesale product movement by national region and time of year. Crystal Reports is available as a separate add-on to Act Premium 2005, but we like the convenience of its inclusion within Maximizer.Maximizer Software provides a lot of technical support. Live support is available for Maximizer 8.0 by telephone Monday through Friday, from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. ET. Following product registration, the first hour or the first five incidents (whichever occurs first) within 30 days are free. After that, things get very expensive, very quickly: $45 per incident on a standalone computer. In a multiuser environment, the first month is $150 per incident, and $200 per incident after that. The fees are higher than expected for software of this caliber.
Context-sensitive help screens offer useful guidance throughout the application.
The context-sensitive in-program help system is effective, with entries for everything from the most generic (Address Book) to the specific (Print Column Report). Maximizer also provides a stellar online searchable knowledge base, though it does not offer e-mail support. There is a printed 32-entry tutorial database and a printed and indexed 200-plus-page user guide, too, but those who'd rather get up to speed quickly might prefer to pay $49 for the optional 100-page training guide.
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- Average user rating: 2.5 stars out of 12 reviews
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