You can configure several options that control how activities work. Most of these settings are configured on the Activity and Appointment Settings dialog box, although a few require you to update Application Server configuration files.
Activity and Appointment Settings
For details about the settings, see the following topics:
- Available Activity Defaults
- Set General Activity Options
- Why Would I Want to Include Associated Companies on an Activity or Appointment?
- Collapsing Multiple Activities into a Single Row in the Web Client Views
- Configuring the Configure Alerts Dialog Box
Available Activity Defaults
The following table summarizes the activity settings you can change in InterAction Administrator.
For some of these options, further detail is available in later sections.
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| New Activity/Appointment Settings | |
| Default 'Who can see this' for activities/appointments |
This value determines the default value for this field when creating a new activity or appointment. The options are:
For details about how security works for activities, see Security for Activities. |
|
Default type, unless specified in PIM, when creating an activity Note that “PIM” displays as the PIM your organization is using (Microsoft Outlook) |
This value determines the default type when creating a new activity. The options are:
Note that users can create activities from selected items in your organization’s PIM. The default activity type stored in this setting is not used for these activities. For details about creating activity types, see Creating and Editing Activity Types and Groups. For information about making activity types available when creating or editing activities, see Determining Where Activity Types are Displayed. |
| When adding an activity/appointment for one or more people | |
| Automatically add each person’s associated company too |
When this option is selected, the associated company for each person included on the activity is included as a contact on the activity or appointment. Note that the associated company for contacts in the Our Personnel and Our Consultants folders are never added automatically. For details, see Why Would I Want to Include Associated Companies on an Activity or Appointment?. |
| Only add the contacts the user selected | When this option is selected, only the contacts the user selected are added to the activity or appointment. Associated companies for the people are not included. |
|
When adding an activity of appointment from a PIM item Note that "PIM" displays as the specific PIM your organization is using (Microsoft® Outlook®) |
|
| Add all people on the item to the activity/appointment |
When this option is selected, all contacts on the item are included on the InterAction activity or appointment. For example, when adding an activity from an e-mail message, all of the e-mail recipients are included on the activity. |
| Exclude Our Personnel and Our Consultants from the activity/appointment |
When this option is selected, any contacts on the item that are also in the Our Personnel or Our Consultants folders are excluded from the activity. This is useful for filtering out “noise,” since it isn’t always useful to have internal people included on the activities or appointments. |
| When adding an activity from an email message | |
| Include the text from the e-mail message | When this option is selected, the text of the e-mail message is automatically included in the body of the activity. Note that the user adding the activity can edit the text as needed, for example, to remove portions of the e-mail that shouldn’t be included. |
| Exclude the text from the e-mail message |
When this option is selected, the text of the e-mail message is not automatically included in the body of the activity. Note that the user adding the activity can choose the Insert Body button to copy the body of the e-mail into the activity. Also, this option only applies to e-mail activities, not calendar items. |
| Viewing Activities/Appointments | |
| When viewing a list, display only one row for an activity/appointment if the number of contacts on it exceeds |
This field allows you to specify the threshold after which an activity or appointment with multiple contacts is displayed in a single row. This primarily affects the My Alerts page. For details, see Collapsing Multiple Activities into a Single Row in the Web Client Views. |
| External Integration | |
| Display the check box to make the activity/appointment available to external contacts | When this check box is selected, the Make available to clients check box is available in the InterAction Windows Client, Web Client, and Desktop Integration when creating new activities. |
| Label: Make available to | Enter the text you want displayed on the check box. |
|
Appointment Settings These settings enable Microsoft® Outlook® calendar synchronization. Note that these options are only displayed if your environment is configured to synchronize with Microsoft . |
|
|
InterAction for Microsoft® Outlook® These settings configure default behavior for InterAction for Microsoft Outlook. |
In addition to the above settings, you can set additional options by editing configuration files on the Application Server. See Configuring the Configure Alerts Dialog Box.
Set General Activity Options
- On the main window of InterAction Administrator, double-click Activities, Appointments, and Document References in the entity list.
- Choose the Settings button.
- Select the options you want. For a list of available settings, see Available Activity Defaults.
- Choose OK to save your changes.
- Choose Close.
Why Would I Want to Include Associated Companies on an Activity or Appointment?
You can configure InterAction to automatically include associated companies on activities. For example, if a user selected Jane Tarnoff of Telenorth and Donna Roeser of Guru, Ltd, and then added an activity, the resulting activity would have four contacts:
- Jane Tarnoff
- Telenorth
- Donna Roeser
- Guru, Ltd.
In most cases, you want to include the companies, for two reasons:
- When viewing a company in InterAction, users can see the activities concerning employees of the company.
- The list of activities for a company continues to accurately reflect the people and companies involved even when people change jobs. For example, assume Ed Roberts created an activity with the four contacts shown above. Later, Donna Roeser leaves Guru, Ltd and her contact information is updated in InterAction. If the activity did not include Guru in the first place, the fact that Guru was involved in some way would be lost.
Collapsing Multiple Activities into a Single Row in the Web Client Views
In InterAction, an activity or appointment can be associated to any number of contacts. Normally, the various activity views in the Web Client display a separate row for each contact. This means the same activity might be displayed multiple times, each time with a different contact. If an activity has a large number of contacts, this view is less useful.
To make this information more useful, you can set a “threshold” to limit this display. This “collapses” the activities into a single row.
Consolidated Activities on the My Alerts Page
[A] Multiple contacts for this activity have been consolidated into a single row.
[B] This is an example of a single activity displaying multiple times, once for each contact. In this case, there are four contacts on this activity, so it falls below the threshold of five.
By default, this threshold is set to five contacts. Therefore, if an activity has six or more contacts associated with it, the activity will be collapsed to a single row.
Collapsing the activities like this works in the My Alerts page, activity search results, and pages displaying activities for a matter, engagement, or opportunity.
This threshold only works correctly if the contacts are associated to the same activity. If, instead, you create several duplicate activities, they will not be consolidated.
You can change the consolidation threshold by changing the When viewing a list, display only one row for an activity if the number of contacts on it exceeds option. You can set this to a number between one and ten. See Set General Activity Options.
Configuring the Configure Alerts Dialog Box
The My Alerts page displays the set of recent activities for the contacts a user has chosen to monitor.
Individual Web Client users can configure the My Alerts page by selecting both the types of activities they want to view, and which contacts they want to monitor. Users choose these options from the Configure Alerts dialog box, which is available from the Configure Alert Defaults link on the My Alerts page.
You can configure the following settings for your organization:
- The set of items (activities and appointments) users can select from the Filter Alerts page. You configure this by specifying which types should be displayed on the page. For details, see “Types Available to End Users” in Determining Where Activity Types are Displayed.
- The set of contacts users can select from the Select Contacts to Monitor page. You configure this by specifying a list of folders in a configuration file.
Configuring the Select Contacts to Monitor Page
The Select Contacts to Monitor page displays a set of contact lists. Web Client users can select which contact collections they want to monitor. Only contacts within the selected collections will generate alerts. In the example shown below, the user has selected to monitor My Contacts, Contacts I Know, and Ed’s Call List.
This list always includes check boxes for My Contacts and Contacts I Know. Out of the box, the list also includes all contact types and the user’s frequently used working lists.
You can customize the set of check boxes shown on this page by editing an Application Server configuration file. If your organization has a large number of folders, you should restrict this page to a reasonable number to avoid overwhelming users.
Selecting the Contacts to Monitor
You configure the page by editing the following options in the InterActionWebPage.cfg file:
- watchListContactsListInclude defines the list of folders that should be included as check boxes on the page.
- watchListContactsListExclude defines a set of folders that should be specifically excluded.
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| watchListContactsListInclude | |
| allContactTypes | All contact types the user has access to read are included. |
| allWorkingLists | All working lists the user has access to read are included. |
| frequentlyUsedWorkingLists | All working lists the user has access to read and has designated as frequently used are included. |
| Folder IDs |
You can specify any folder ID to include the folder on the page. Folder IDs should be specified in the format of sourceID/FolderID. For example, the out-of-the-box Holiday Card marketing list has the following folder ID: 2/-10017 Note that most of the out-of-the-box folder IDs are negative numbers. Folders you create have positive number IDs. Therefore, the ID for a custom folder you have created might look like this: 2/42 |
| allFolders (obsolete) | Previous versions of InterAction included an allFolders option. If this option is still set in your environment, it behaves the same as the allWorkingLists option. |
| watchListContactsListExclude | |
| Folder ID |
You can specify any folder ID to exclude from the page. Folder IDs should be specified in the format of sourceID/FolderID. For example, the out-of-the-box Deceased contact type has the following folder ID: 2/-10011 Out of the box, the Deceased and Out of Business Companies contact types are excluded. |
Change the Check Boxes Shown on the Contacts to Monitor Page
To change the set of lists shown on the Contacts to Monitor page, do the following:
-
On your InterAction Application Server machine, locate the etc directory.
In a default installation, this is the following:
C:\Program Files\LexisNexis\InterAction\AppServer\iahome\etc
- Open the file called InterActionWebPage.cfg in a text editor.
-
Locate the watchListContactsListInclude variable.
By default, this is set to include all contact types and frequently used working lists. The line looks like the following:
watchListContactsListInclude = allContactTypes;frequentlyUsedWorkingLists
-
Using semi-colons (;) to separate items, add folder IDs for the folders you want to include in the list. For details about the options you can include, see Configure General Settings for Activities & Appointments.
For example, assume your organization created a marketing list called “Technology Newsletter” that you want to include. The source ID for this folder is 2 and the folder ID is 42. Therefore, you would enter the following:
watchListContactsListInclude = allContactTypes;frequentlyUsedWorkingLists;
2/42
In your text editor, this should appear all on one line.
- If you want to specifically exclude any folders, add the folder ID to the watchListContactsListExclude setting, again separating multiple items with semi-colons.
- Save the InterActionWebPage.cfg file. The changes are available after the next Application Server cache refresh.