After you have extracted your contact information from your identified data sources and performed any modifications necessary to the data files, you can begin loading the contact information into InterAction.
InterAction includes three different tools for bringing contact information into InterAction. The tool that is best for you to use depends on the type of information you choose to bring in and how often you want to update it from the external system.
InterAction Data Load Tools
| Data Load Tool | Use for the Following Situation |
|---|---|
| Advanced Import |
It is less complicated than Application Collaboration, but it offers more functionality than the regular import feature. In most cases, you should only choose to use a different data load tool if your contact information is in any of the situations described below. For details on how to use the Advanced Import feature, see Updating InterAction Contacts through Advanced Import. |
| Application Collaboration |
If you want the InterAction contact information to be updated on a regular basis with changes from an external system, you should bring the contact information into InterAction using Application Collaboration. This tool offers the ability to import the following fields that are not supported by the Advanced Import feature:
For details on how to use Application Collaboration, see How Application Collaboration Works. |
| InterAction Import |
In general, the Advanced Import feature is a better choice for loading data into InterAction because of the advanced duplicate checking ability of that feature. However the regular import feature is available for bringing contact information into InterAction if you do not have many duplicate contacts to manage or if Application Collaboration or Advanced Import are not available. For details on how to use the regular import feature, see Importing Data into InterAction. |
Creating Unique Contact Identifiers (UCI)
When bringing contact information in from other sources, you can define a unique contact identifier for each contact. UCI values can be used to identify contacts in InterAction when using features such as Advanced Import. For example, after you initially load information into InterAction from your accounting system, you may identify another field in that database that you want to bring into InterAction for each contact. To correctly match the contacts when bringing in the new field, you can use the UCI value.
Unique contact identifiers are stored in the UCI global additional field in InterAction. Because several different versions of the same contact can be brought into InterAction from multiple systems and then merged, the UCI additional field supports multiple values.
Because the UCI value can be used to match contacts when updating contacts in InterAction using the Advanced Import feature, you must ensure that each UCI value is completely unique. To ensure this, use the following information when you define a UCI value for a contact:
- An indicator of the system from which the contact came - Typically, this should be a four letter abbreviation. For example, if you are bringing the contact in from your accounting system, you may choose to use ACTG.
- The unique identifiers assigned to the record in the external system - For example, if you are bringing a contact into InterAction from your accounting system and the contact has the ID of 987654 in the accounting system, you can define a UCI value of ACTG:987654.
This value can be used to identify what system the contact came from and the contact’s ID in that external system. UCI values can be used for contact identification with many different features including Advanced Import.
When you have Unique Contact Identifiers set for contact information, updates to contacts during subsequent data loads are much more reliable than attempting to use name matching for contacts.
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