In a new or upgraded InterAction environment, the language-specific contact information features are turned off. If your organization needs to store language-specific fields for contacts, you can enable the feature.
You need to turn the feature on, then configure the Gender and Preferred Correspondence Language fields. Once this is done, you can create language-specific custom fields and populate them with data as needed.
See the following topics:
- Configuring the Gender Field
- About the Preferred Correspondence Language Field
- About Entering Data in the Gender and Preferred Correspondence Language Fields
Enable Language-Specific Contact Information
Use InterAction Administrator to enable language-specific contact information.
- On the main window of InterAction Administrator, double-click Language Configuration in the main entity list. The Language and Version Options dialog opens.
- Select the Configuration button.
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Select the Enable language-specific contact information check box.
- Choose OK.
- Close the Language and Version Options dialog to save the setting.
After enabling the feature, you should configure the Gender and Preferred Correspondence Language fields. See Configuring the Gender Field and About the Preferred Correspondence Language Field.
Configuring the Gender Field
In many languages, it is important to know the gender of the person when creating a salutation for a letter or other mailing. Many languages have a grammatical gender. Therefore, enabling language-specific contact information adds a Gender field to contacts. Users can fill in this field when creating and editing contacts in any InterAction client (the Windows Client, the Web Client, and the PIM Clients).
Marketing users can then filter on gender when setting up language-specific mailings. There are different approaches for handling this, such as creating separate templates for masculine and feminine mailings. Alternatively, users can create a single template that uses Word’s If-Then-Else fields to handle different genders in mailings.
InterAction has provided an out-of-the-box Gender field for many versions. Alternatively, your organization may have used a different field to store this information. To be sure that the correct field is in use, you need to review your dictionaried additional fields and make sure that the Gender Additional Field item is mapped to the field your organization uses to store a contact’s gender.
The additional field to use must be a global field that uses the Yes/No data type.
- In InterAction Administrator, double-click Dictionaried Additional Fields. The Manage Dictionaried Additional Fields dialog appears with a list of the field names.
- In the list, find Gender Additional Field and note whether it is already mapped to a field.
- If you need to change the mapping, select Gender Additional Field and choose Edit.
- Select the additional field to use for storing a contact’s gender and choose OK.
- Choose Close to close the Manage Dictionaried Additional Fields dialog box.
For more information about dictionaried fields, see Dictionaried Additional Fields.
Once the Gender field has been configured, users can start entering data in it when creating and editing contacts. For an overview, see About Entering Data in the Gender and Preferred Correspondence Language Fields.
About the Preferred Correspondence Language Field
Enabling language-specific contact data activates a new global additional field called Preferred Correspondence Language. Users can fill in this field when creating and editing contacts in any InterAction client (the Windows Client, the Web Client, and the PIM Clients).
The Preferred Correspondence Language field must be set to Active in the Manage Global Additional Field dialog.
Marketing users can then filter on preferred language when setting up language-specific mailings. Normally users would create a separate template for each language.
The Preferred Correspondence Language field is a global additional field, but has some special properties:
- You cannot use the normal dialog boxes in InterAction Administrator to edit the list items for the field. Instead, you need to manage the set of preferred languages; see Configuring the List of Languages.
- The field is a system field that cannot be deleted.
- The field is displayed on contacts on the dialog boxes used for entering name information (see About Entering Data in the Gender and Preferred Correspondence Language Fields). Users can also enter values in the normal Additional Information views, but it is generally easier to enter this data when entering a contact’s name.
- The field is inactive out-of-the-box, but must be activated for you to use International Correspondence. The field must be set to Active in the Manage Global Additional Field dialog.
Before users can enter data in this field, you need to add at least one preferred language. See Configuring the List of Languages.
When using language-specific information, you must use the provided Preferred Correspondence Language field. If you stored language information like this for contacts previously, you need to migrate your existing data to this new field. There are many different ways to store language information. Therefore, this migration process would require you to determine how the information was stored previously and how to map it appropriately to the Preferred Correspondence Language field.
Due to the way this field stores the selected languages, you cannot just use a different, already-existing field.
About Entering Data in the Gender and Preferred Correspondence Language Fields
The Gender and Preferred Correspondence Language fields are available in the various InterAction clients in the same area as entering other name information. For example, the figure below shows where these fields are shown when editing a contact’s name in the Web Client. The next figure shows the same fields in the Windows Client.
Users can enter data in the fields using the Web Client, Windows Client, and PIM Clients.
Entering Preferred Correspondence Language and Gender in the Web Client
Entering Preferred Correspondence Language and Gender in the Windows Client
These fields are primarily used for filtering contacts when preparing international mailings. For example, a marketing user would filter contacts by the Dutch (Netherlands) preferred language, and then add the correct merge fields (such as Dutch-specific salutations) to labels, letters, or envelopes.