The Information folders are special folders that fall into the Administrative Folder class. They store information about contacts that is frequently used in Web Client profiles. This generally includes any folder-specific information such as additional fields and notes.
Professional users typically view this information using the profile pages in the Web Client. For example, the figure below illustrates the client profile for the client Guru, Ltd. This page displays additional fields containing information useful to a professional working with the client. In this example, the information shown on the page is stored in two different information folders:
- The data in the Client Profile and All Client Numbers sections comes from the Client Information folder.
- The data in the Client Financial Information section comes from the Client Financial Information folder.
Client Profile Displays Data from an Information Folder
[A] This is the Additional Information view in the Windows Client. It displays all of the folder-specific additional fields for all folders that contain the contact.
[B] This is the Client profile in the Web Client. Note that the data is from different folders.
Information folders are also useful for storing sensitive information. You can use folder access rights to control who is allowed to see the information in both the Web Client and Windows Client.
For example, you might want to limit which users are allowed to see the financial information available. You could use folder access rights to restrict the Client Financial Information folder to be visible to only partners. A user without read access to the folder would not see the data on the Client Profile page in the Web Client or in the Additional Information view in the Windows Client.
A new installation of InterAction includes the following information folders:
- Personnel Information
- Client Financial Information
- Company\Person Information
- Client Information
For details about the default information folders, see Information Folders.
Because the information folders are considered administrative folders, they are never presented to Web Client users as lists. In other words, a Web Client user cannot open a “Client Financial Information” list and see all the contacts in the folder. Instead, the user can see the contacts assigned the Client contact type and can view the Client profile for these contacts. This profile displays the information from the Client Financial Information folder. Users do not need to know how the data is structured behind the scenes.
What is the Purpose of the Information Folders?
At first glance it may not be obvious why you would need the information folders. For example, there already is an Our Personnel folder. Since you can track information about your organization’s personnel in this folder, why would you need the Personnel Information folder? Similarly, why do you need a Client Financial Information folder when there is already a Clients folder?
Information folders exist for one of two reasons:
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To support a shared profile - For example, the Personnel Information folder tracks information relevant to contacts that have either the Our Personnel or Alumni contact type When an employee leaves your organization, you remove the contact from the Our Personnel folder and add the contact to the Alumni folder. There is certain information, however, that applies to both current and former employees. For example, for a current employee you would record the person’s level. For a former employee, you would continue to store this since it tells you the level the person was at when he or she left the organization.
If all this information was tracked in the Our Personnel folder, the values would be lost when you moved the contact out of the folder when the contact leaves the organization.
- To protect sensitive information - For example, the Client Financial Information folder contains fields to which you would not want all users to have access, such as year-to-date revenue. Because access rights are applied on a folder basis, having a separate folder for this information allows you to set different security for this folder than for less sensitive client information, such as client number.