Karen Fredricks began her life rather non-technically growing up in Kenya. She likes to say that she developed her sense of humor while dodging bombs in Beirut where she attended high school. She graduated from the University of Florida and holds degrees in English, Theatre, and Accounting. She settled in Boca Raton where she includes tennis, trips to the gym, and cheering for the Gators in her busy schedule.
A true CRM expert, she is the author of over 10 For Dummy books, including titles on ACT!, SugarCRM, Outlook, Business Contact Manager, Office Live, and Marketing with Microsoft Office 2007. This is her sixth book devoted to ACT!.
Her firm, Tech Benders, customizes popular contact management and CRM software to help businesses grow by being more productive, efficient, and profitable. Karen believes in working smarter in order to have the time to enjoy life and tries to install that philosophy in her clients.
She is thrilled to being working with Roy Laudenslager as the co-author of this book. He has provided his expertise to several of her previous books and his knowledge of the ACT! Report Writer is second to none.
Roy Laudenslager has spent his entire career working on computers. He likes to say he barely missed the vacuum tube computers. He has repaired them, written numerous training manuals about them, and spent many years troubleshooting them. He began working for Symantec when they combined all their technical support in a new site in Eugene, Oregon. When they acquired the ACT! program, he was one of the first ACT! support agents. He was already familiar with the ACT! program having used the DOS version at another company. He spent the next 10 years, supporting the ACT! program for Symantec, then InterACT Commerce Corporation, and finally for Sage Software. By the time he left, he was the lead support agent for ACT! escalations. Escalations are the problems that the regular support agents are unable to solve; his job was to solve the unsolvable. He also trained new support staff on database field modifications, reports, and synchronization. His expertise in the area of synchronization lead to the Knowledge Base document that he wrote for setting up synchronization, making it possible to synchronize ACT! 3 through 6 reliably. After 10 years in ACT! technical support, he wanted to become an ACT! Consultant so he left Sage and joined Karen Fredricks as part of Tech Benders to allow him to do what he loved to do: work with ACT! users!
He has worked with the ACT! reports since ACT! for Windows 2.0 and is known around Sage as the ACT! report writer guru. He wrote the 12 new reports that first appeared in ACT! 2010/12.
In the early part of his career, he spent several years working as a technical writer and authored many training and reference manuals.
While working in technical support for Symantec and later Sage, he contributed one or more articles monthly to the Easy ACT! newsletter. This body of work took place over a seven-year period and represented over 100 articles.
Most recently he was the Technical Editor for the Dummy books on ACT! versions 7-11.