InterAction’s Who Knows Whom™ feature is a special type of relationship that allows professionals to find out who else at your organization knows a contact and how. Using Who Knows Whom™, professionals can direct inquiries to the correct people within the organization that know a contact instead of sending out mass inquiries to everyone in the organization.
Users can view Who Knows Whom™ information in both the Web Client and the Windows Client.
InterAction is designed to make it easy for users to enter information about the people they know.
For more information, see the following topics:
- How InterAction Determines Who Knows Whom Relationships
- Creating Who Knows Whom Relationships Automatically
- Set InterAction to Automatically Create Who Knows Whom Relationships
- Allowing Users to Enter Anonymous Relationships
- Set the Support of Anonymous Relationships
How InterAction Determines Who Knows Whom Relationships
InterAction primarily records Who Knows Whom™ relationships with the Knows and Known by relationship types. Because of this, you cannot edit or inactivate these two relationship types. These types are used to collect “knows” relationships between people in your organization and other people or companies.
InterAction uses the Our Personnel contact type to determine which contacts are actually employees of your organization. This is because the Who Knows Whom™ shows relationships between your organization’s employees and other contacts. Therefore, a contact will not appear in any of the Who Knows Whom views in either Web Client or Windows Client unless the contact is also assigned the Our Personnel contact type.
InterAction then uses these relationships, as well as other relationships, when building various views of information in the Windows Client and the Web Client.
In the Windows Client, the Who Knows Whom™ view for a contact displays all the individuals in your organization who have any relationship with the contact. This view includes the Knows and Known By relationships.
Who Knows Whom View in the Windows Client
In the Web Client, users can see the list of people who know a person or people at a company on the Company/Person Overview pages and the Related People, Companies, and Organizations page along with other relationships.
For a person, Who Knows Whom™ information is displayed under My co-workers who know this person filter. This view lists all individuals in your organization (i.e., people assigned the Our Personnel contact type) who have any relationship with the contact, including Knows relationships.
For a company, the information appears in two main places on the page:
- The People my co-workers know displays all the people who work at the company and who have a relationship with someone in your organization. This uses all relationship types, including Knows/Known by.
- People I know displays all the people at the company known by the user. This view only uses the Knows/Known by relationship types.
The figure below illustrates this for both a person and a company.
[A] Who Knows Whom for a person – viewing your co-workers who know a contact.
[B] Who Knows Whom for a company – Viewing your co-workers who know people at the company.
[C] Who Knows Whom for a person – Viewing the people you know at a company.
Creating Who Knows Whom Relationships Automatically
To help collect Who Knows Whom™ information without requiring extensive effort from professionals, you can configure InterAction to create relationships automatically in certain circumstances.
When a user does either of the following, InterAction can create a relationship between the user and the contact to indicate that the user knows the contact:
- The user finds a contact in the firm list and chooses Add to My Contacts.
- The user adds a contact in their list to the firm list.
For example, Lisa Short finds a contact for Donna Roeser in the firm list. She chooses Add to My Contacts to add Donna Roeser to her contact list. A relationship is automatically created that indicates Lisa Short Knows Donna Roeser and conversely, Donna Roeser is Known by Lisa Short.
You can set defaults that control whether these Knows/Known By relationships are created automatically. You set these defaults for each user. You can also set whether the user is allowed to change this default or not.
For more about user defaults, see the Administering InterAction guide.
You can set any of the following behaviors:
- A relationship is automatically created between the user and a contact, however, the user can decide to turn this off later.
- A relationship is automatically created between the user and a contact and the user is not given the option to change this.
- A relationship is not automatically created between the user and a contact, however the user can decide to turn this on later.
- A relationship is not automatically created between the user and a contact and the user is not given the option to change this.
In addition, your organization can purchase InterAction IQ. This product can mine data in Microsoft® Outlook® and use it to discover and create relationships. It can also update existing relationships with calculated strength information.
Set InterAction to Automatically Create Who Knows Whom Relationships
- Log on to InterAction Administrator.
- On the main window entity list, double-click User Account and Group Configuration.
- Choose the User Contact Lists button.
- Select the user contact list you wish to change and choose Edit.
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Select the Relationship tab.
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Under Who Knows Whom Settings, select the settings for creating Knows relationships for this user.
To Do This Automatically create relationships and allow the user to change the setting Select both check boxes Automatically create relationships and prevent the user from changing the setting Select the first check box and clear the second Not create relationships and allow the user to change the setting Clear the first check box and select the second check box Not create relationships and prevent the user from changing the setting Select neither checkbox -
When finished, choose OK.