IXACT Contact and Apple - a Marriage Made in Heaven!

CRM is indeed my specialty! I am a broker/reseller for over 30 different real estate specific CRMs. I literally "wrote the book" on RE CRM.

Yes - IXACT Contact will help you do the export if you need them to, and will then take that export and import it into IXACT Contact. Unfortunately Agent Office has one of the worst export utilities out there. It exports most contact information just fine, but that is pretty much it, but does not export categories or notes. If you can't export them, you can't import them. It doesn't matter what you're importing into.

There are two programs out there that do not use the Agent Office export. They instead take the Agent Office Data folder and extract the data directly from that, which enables them to get sigificantly more data out of it, including notes, categories, Activity Plans from the Plans Manager, Calendar Items, some property information, and sometimes the letter library.

Does that make them better? Not necessarily. It depends upon your needs. Call me and we'll see.

Question 1 - You have to use Intellisycnh to synch AO with Outlook and then Outlook to the iPhone, if you can get it to work. July 2006 was the last actual Upgrade to AO. (if you don't count the July 2007 update that just made it Vista Compliant) It seems that the further away we get from that last AO Upgrade the more problems there are with synhing and just in general.

Question 2 - I know AO as well as anyone as far as teaching and traning on it. When it comes to the bits and bytes, there are some thigns I know, and some I don't. I take on that type of job n a case by case bassis after discernign whther I can help. The fee is $100/hr.

Your best bet for synching issues is the Yahoo user group for AO at http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/onlineagentusers/  You will likely find anecdotal experience there.

The AO we all know and (used to) love is now a dead product. If you would ike to see what is available to replace it, give me a call.

They are actually three very different programs satisfying three different types of needs.

IXACTContact is a kind of Top Producer lite. It's strengths are it's compatibility with the Mac platform as well as Windows, it's seamless real time integration with Outlook, and pretty much any phone, and it's ease of learning and use.

My Red Tools' forte is its "Best in Class" choice of marketing materials. Its CRM aspect used to be a little on the light side, but it has shored that up nicely.

Advantage Xi's strengths are that it has its own fully integrated e-mail client, enabling automatic storage of all e-mails with the contact automatically, and the ability to auto-populate new leads as contacts and launch a follow-up activity plan. It is also the most powerful in the context of database management, transaction management, referral tracking, forms/report creation, and task management, and integrates nicely with a free G-mail account.

To compare them all here in any kind of detail would take too long. I am always happy to talk about the pros and cons of each in a phone conversation, to help you determine which best suits your individual aptitude, current needs, and future goals.