To help encourage users to indicate when they know a contact by using the Who Knows Whom™ feature, you can allow anonymous Who Knows Whom™. By doing this, users can indicate they know a contact without letting other users know who they are.
For example, the user Robb Allen has indicated that he knows a contact anonymously. Other users can only see that someone in the organization knows the contact; they don’t see Robb’s name. When Robb is logged on to InterAction, he can see the relationship he entered marked “Anonymous.”
[A] Robb is the currently logged-on user, so he can see his own anonymous relationship with this contact.
[B] When Ed Roberts looks at the same contact, he does not see Robb’s name. However, he can choose to send an e-mail message to the users with anonymous relationships with this contact.
Using the InterAction Web Client, users can send e-mail messages to users who indicate they know a contact but want to keep their relationship private. After receiving the e-mail, the anonymous users can determine whether they want to reveal themselves and provide information to the requesting user.
In the example shown below, a user chose to send the inquiry to both the people with the anonymous relationships and those with visible relationships (Lisa Short and Chris Johnson). The e-mail messages sent to both types of users are shown below.
Sending an Inquiry to People Who Know a Contact
[A] You can send a message to users with anonymous relationships even though you can’t see their names.
[B] These users have visible relationships.
Message Sent to Users Who Kept their Relationship Private
[A] No identifying information is included in the message header. The anonymous user can decide whether to reveal his or her relationship with the contact.
[B] You can configure the text used for the subject line and message prefix.
[C] The message text entered by the user sending the inquiry appears here.
Message Sent to Users with Public Relationships
[A] Users who did not request anonymity receive a normal e-mail message.
[B] You can configure the text used for the subject line and message prefix.
[C] The message text entered by the user sending the inquiry appears here.
You can configure the text used for the message subject and the prefix text that appears before the user’s message. For details, see Configure the Email Inquiry.
Note that the currently logged-in user must be associated with a contact, and that contact must have at least one e-mail address for the user to send an anonymous inquiry. If the Send Inquiry To Co-workers Who Know link does not appear for a user, make sure that the user has at least one e-mail address.
After you have decided whether or not your organization allows anonymous Who Knows Whom™ relationships, you should not change this setting. If you turn off support for anonymous relationships, you will have to choose between deleting all existing anonymous relationships, or making them public. This change cannot be reversed.
Set the Support of Anonymous Relationships
- Log on to InterAction Administrator.
- On the Main Entity Window, double-click Configuration.
- Select the Relationships tab.
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To support anonymous relationships, select the Support anonymous relationships checkbox. To not allow anonymous relationships, clear the check box.
- Choose OK.
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If you are turning off support for anonymous relationships, you are prompted to select the action InterAction should take for all of the existing anonymous relationships in the system.
You can choose one of the following:
- Completely delete the relationship
- Make the relationship public
Configure the Email Inquiry
You can configure the text used in e-mail messages sent by the Who Knows Whom e-mail inquiry feature. You can change the following:
- The text used in the subject line of the e-mail message.
- The prefix text used an e-mail sent to people with visible relationships.
- The prefix used in an e-mail sent to people with anonymous relationships.
The prefix text for the two types of messages are configured separately because normally you need to provide additional instructions to users with anonymous relationships. For an example of the e-mails that are sent.
You change this text by editing the InterActionWebPage.cfg configuration file. The file is located in the etc directory of your Application Server install.
The InterActionWebPage.cfg file contains three settings:
- wkwInquirySubject defines the text for the subject line.
- wkwInquiryPreface defines the prefix text for non-anonymous relationships.
- wkwInquiryPrefaceAnon defines the prefix text for anonymous relationships.
When setting items, you can information about the current contact by using any of the following variables in the text:
- $$(contactName)
- $$(senderName)
- $$(senderEmail)
For example, the out-of-the-box value for the wkwInquirySubject is defined as the following:
wkwInquirySubject = Request for information regarding $$(contactName)
The $$(contactName) variable is replaced with the actual name of the contact that the inquiry is asking about.
Change the Who Knows Whom Inquiry Email Text
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On your InterAction Application Server machine, locate the etc directory. In a typical installation, this is normally the following:
C:\Program Files\LexisNexis\InterAction\AppServer\iahome\etc
- Open the file called InterActionWebPage.cfg in a text editor.
- Locate the wkwInquirySubject, wkwInquiryPreface or wkwInquiryPrefaceAnon variable.
- Change the value to the text you want. You can use variables within the URL to pass information about the contact.
- $$(contactName)
- $$(senderName)
- $$(senderEmail)
- Save the InterActionWebPage.cfg file.
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The new text will be used the next time Application Server reloads the cache.