InterAction allows you to track interactions you have with a contact, such as phone calls, letters, e-mail messages, and meetings. These are useful for tracking an organization’s history with a contact. InterAction also automatically tracks certain changes to contact data by generating activities, such as creating a Person Name Change activity if a user edits a contact’s name.
In addition, if you are using Microsoft® Outlook®, you can set up calendar synchronization. This lets users add calendar items as appointments in InterAction. For details about setting up and using appointment synchronization, see the InterAction for Personal Information Managers (PIMs) guide.
In the Web Client, users can display alerts to see recent activities and appointments for a specified set of contacts.
Note that the term “alerts” is configurable. In earlier versions of InterAction, alerts were referred to as the “Watch List.”
The following sections provide a high-level overview of activities.
Overall Activity Settings
You can configure several options that control how activities work. For example, you can designate whether e-mail activities should automatically include the text from the body of the e-mail message. For details about the available defaults and setting them, see Configure General Settings for Activities & Appointments.
Activity Types and Activity Type Groups
Users can create, edit, and delete activities in both the Web Client and the Windows Client. Each activity has an activity type. Activity types describe the kind of activity recorded, such as E-mail, Letter, or Marketing mailing. Types are useful for standardizing activities. For instance, a professional can easily search for all contacts that have been sent a marketing mailing by searching for contacts with a “Marketing mailing” activity.
InterAction has a number of activity types provided out-of-the-box. Some of these activity types can be modified to meet your needs. You can also create new ones as needed. When configuring activity types, you can determine how they can be used. For example, you can designate whether or not a type is available when selecting activities to show on the My Alerts page.
To further aid in sorting activities, each activity type is part of an activity group. Activity groups are used in the Web Client for sorting and filtering activities in the activity views and the My Alerts page. For example, in the figure below, the Communication and Marketing groups are selected. This filters the activities view to show only activities assigned types within these groups.
Choosing to Filter Activities by Group
[A] All the types within the Communications and Marketing groups are included.
[B] Only the Evaluation type under the Other group is included.
For information about creating and editing activity types and groups, see the following:
Activity Relevance and Security
An activity can be relevant to contacts or a folder, such as a marketing list. This provides context around the activities. For example, when you send a mailing, you can record this action with an activity regarding the mailing list.
In previous versions of InterAction, activities relevant to contacts were called global activities, while those regarding a folder were called folder-specific activities.
For more about activities that are specific to a folder, see “About Folder-Specific and Global Activities” in Folder-Specific and Global Data.
If your organization has licensed a related module, an activity can be relevant to a matter, opportunity, or engagement. See the documentation provided with your module for details about module activities.
When creating an activity, the user can designate which other users can see and edit the activity. An activity can be private (available only to the user who created it), available to everyone, or just a specific group. Normal folder access rights can also be used to determine access to activities that are regarding a specific folder.
For details about setting security on activities, see Security for Activities.
Automatically-Generated Activities
InterAction automatically creates activities when users enter and change information. For example, changing a contact’s phone number generates a “Phone Number Change” activity. This alerts other users to changes that might impact them. Displaying these activities as alerts essentially “pushes” these changes out to other users.
For more about alerts and automatically generated activities, see Automatically-Generated Activities.
Creating Activities from a Personal Information Manager (PIM)
InterAction also includes components for creating activities from within a Personal Information Manager (PIM). Users can do the following:
- Create InterAction activities from e-mail messages and other items.
- Synchronize appointments with InterAction (Outlook only).
Note that this is a one-way synchronization from Outlook to InterAction.
Including Documents on Activities
If you have configured InterAction to store documents, users can include documents on the activities they create. In addition, attachments can be automatically included on activities created from the Outlook items when working online.
For details about setting up documents, see InterAction Documents.
Removing Old Activities Automatically
Finally, after a period of time, some types of activities can lose their value and should be removed from the system. To assist in this process, InterAction includes features to automatically purge activities after they have existed in the system for a specific period of time. For more information, see Automatically Removing Activities.
About Configuring Activity Types and Related Settings
You manage all activity-related configuration in InterAction Administrator. The relevant settings are all available on the Activities, Appointments, and Document References dialog box.
Also note that you must do the following before you can configure any activity settings:
- Set up and start the InterAction Application Server.
- Configure InterAction Administrator to communicate with the Application Server. To check whether this is set, choose Configuration from the main entity list in InterAction Administrator, then choose the General tab.
For more details about setting up your Application Server and configuring InterAction Administrator to communicate with it, see the Administering InterAction guide.