An address data set brings addresses, phones, email, or Web site addresses for companies or people into InterAction. An address data set can either import street addresses, or phones and electronic addresses. You can create as many address data sets as you need.
When transforming an address data set, Application Collaboration does the following for each phone or address harvested from the external system:
- Find the contact to update in InterAction. You can choose the method used to do this.
- Find the phone or address to update
- Either update the existing item with the harvested data, or add the item as a new phone or address.
When populating InterAction with phones and addresses from another system, you define address rules to define how InterAction should assign address types to the address information from the external system.
Application Collaboration refers to creating and updating addresses. This includes phones, fax numbers, electronic addresses, and street addresses unless otherwise noted.
Note that Application Collaboration can also delete addresses values. You do so by harvesting the identifiers to find the contact and the phone or address, then leaving the columns for the address values blank.
This overview covers the following topics:
Address Rules
Similar to data sets, an address rule is specific to a particular data source. You can view the set of address rules for a data source by selecting any item related to that data source in the console list.
Address rules display in the bottom-right pane of the main Application Collaboration view. The rules are global to the data source - they display regardless of the selected data set.
[A] Select any item within the data source...
[B] ...to view the address rules for that data source.
If no address rules are defined for a data source, the default address rules are used:
- All address types in the external system are mapped to the global Alternate Business type.
- The address key is provided by the data source.
Transforming the data in this case generates a warning in the SQL Results. If the above address rule is what you want, you can ignore this warning.
Selecting the Address Data to Bring In
Decide which phones and addresses you need in InterAction. Before deciding to bring in a piece of data, consider how it is used by InterAction users.
For example, if the billing address in the external system is not going to be used by InterAction users, it probably does not make sense to bring it into InterAction. On the other hand, if users use the billing address in mailings, or if they find it useful to help identify clients, then it does make sense to bring it in.
Bringing unneeded information into the system can make it confusing and less useful to the end-users. Therefore, only bring in current data that is consistently updated in the external system. Otherwise, the data in InterAction can become stale and less useful.
Harvesting Addresses and Phones
The Address data set table includes columns for either the street address fields, or for phone numbers, fax numbers, email addresses, and Web site addresses. The specific columns depend on the options you select for the data set.
In InterAction, a phone number can be tied to an address as a company location. A company location consists of an address, phone numbers, and fax numbers that are all located in the same place.
Application Collaboration matches phones to addresses using the values harvested into the ADDRESS_ID column. If a phone’s ADDRESS_ID matches the ADDRESS_ID for a street address, the two are tied together as a company location.
For example, for the company shown below, the billing address (1635 Pavlis Way), phone and fax are all considered one location. The address was harvested into one table with an ID of 20, while the phone and fax were harvested into a second table, also with an ID of 20.
[A] This address, phone, and fax number all came from the accounting system. These three items compose a company location in InterAction, so they are displayed together.
Only phones and street addresses can be tied together in this way; electronic addresses are not included in locations.
Note also that this only applies to companies; Application Collaboration does not tie phones and addresses together for person contacts, although users can do so manually using either the Windows Client or the Web Client.