Contacts
'Contacts' are people and organizations that matter to your team.
TeemWork allows you to keep a lot of information about each of your contacts, such as their name, address, and phone number. So, in a way, they are a replacement for the common 'Rolodex' paper cards, where employees usually write this kind of information.
However, Contacts are much more than that. They are a complete record of all the communications and transactions involved in your team's relationship with anybody. Everything that occurs between you and your Contact is stored permanently, and other team members have instant access to that information, if it is allowed by their Team Administrator
Here's a list of the features that use Contacts:
Associate Contacts with scheduled Activities in your Agenda
Write Follow-ups for specific Contacts: A Follow-up is a reminder that something has to be done. For example, there could be a Follow-up "Problem with the computer of Client X"
Write Invoices, Checks, or Purchase Orders
Enter additional information in the Contact's Profile, such as his education, work experiences, equipment, and references.
A Contact Card contains basic information about one Contact, and provides links to the features mentioned above. For example, here's the Contact Card for the client Stan Lowe:
All the basic information is kept in the fields of this window. Users can click on the buttons at the bottom to open up other windows. For example, the 'Show Follow-ups' button shows all the follow-ups ever written that were associated to this Contact
The 'Profile' contains even more details about him:
Each element in the list to the left corresponds to a different part of the Contact's profile.
To open a Contact Card, you have to use the Contact List, by clicking on the 'Contacts' menu.
There is one row per Contact. Click on any of them to open its Contact Card.
In some teams, there might be hundreds or thousands of Contacts. This is why there are categories, called 'Contact Types'. Every Contact has a Contact Type, and Administrators can decide who has access to the Contacts of any given Type. There are dozens of different Contact Types in TeemWork, such as 'Candidate', 'Supplier', 'Shareholder' and 'Physician'.
In the previous slide, there were only 'Clients'. To display Contacts of another Type, use the drop-down menu in the upper-left corner of the Contact List.
A Contact can be either a person or an organization. The most important difference between those two, as far as TeemWork is concerned, is that a person has a first name and a last name, whereas an organization has only one name. To indicate that a Contact is an organization, select the 'N/A' radio button on its Contact Card.
Access to Contact Types
Administrator can decide who can view, modify and create Contacts of any given type. This feature is particularly useful if privacy is a concern in your company.
These rights are specified in the 'Access to Contact Types' tab of the 'User Management' window, as is shown in the next slide. Each checkbox is associated to a different access level.
The Contact Types in the drop-down menu of the Contact List are all those that the user 'Can see'. The other access levels similarly effect the Contact Card's buttons.
Administrators can rename the Contact Types in the 'Access to Contact Types' tab, so that they are more meaningful to the team's members. It is better to rename them as soon as possible, because changing the name of a Contact Type when it is already in use might confuse some users.
The 'TeemMember' Contact Type is special; it automatically contains all the team's users. Only Administrators have the right to add new TeemMember, by adding a new user to the team.
Managing Contacts effectively using Groups
The Contact List allows you to view a list of Contacts of any Type, like Clients or Suppliers. But what if you wanted to make a list of all the golf players you know?
The problem is that someone who is a golf player could also be your client, and a Contact can only be of one type at once. If 'Golf Player' is a Contact Type, then Golf Players cannot be Clients and vice-versa.
The 'Groups' feature was created to solve this problem. A Group is simply a list of Contacts of any given type. A Contact can also be part of many groups at once.
For example, an Administrator could create a 'Golf Players' Group, whose members would include various Employees, a few Suppliers and one Client.
To manage and use groups, open the 'Group Management' window.
The team's Groups are displayed to the left, and the selected Group's members, to the right. The
'Code' and 'Quantity' fields can have any relevant value (like the score at the last golf tournament, in our example).
In the current version of TeemWork, the Administrators are the only users that
can use Groups.
For more information
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