Act! Password 14.1

LastBit Act! Password is a program for recovering passwords that protect Act! databases. Sage Act! is a Contact and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. It allows people to create and maintain databases containing business data. These databases can be password protected. And sometimes those passwords can be forgotten. Or maybe an employee quits working at the company, leaving the base unusable for those that do not know the password. And here is where LastBit Act! Password comes into the scene.

This program can retrieve the passwords that protect Act! databases, created using any version of the Act! software. The developer says that this program will work with databases generated in Act! 2008 or earlier. During the tests run while writing this review, it worked flawlessly on an Act! 2011 database.

The program begins with identifying the users defined for a given database. It will then show you the list of users and will inform you if they have defined a password or not. Should you want to regain access to the database for a user who defined a password, the program will offer you three possibilities: you can make the program try to break the password (that will take a lot of time), or you can reset the password for the selected user or all the users.

Finding the passwords was instantaneous in previous versions of Act!, because the user and password information were stored in a .BLB file. Recent versions (2008 and newer) store that information in an SQL database. So the program will need to use methods such as Brute Force Attack or Dictionary Search to look for a password. That takes lots of time. LastBit Act! Password provides a Password Calculator that will estimate how much time the program will need to find out a password.

Resetting the password is much easier, but in some cases this will not be a good option, because the original password will remain unknown, and the original user will know that you have changed it.

The demo version of this program can recover passwords up to three characters in length.