A major part of HQ is the ability to build up data for each of your contacts and to share that data with other people in your team. To do this, you need to link the data to the contact.
The process of linking the data to the contact achieves two goals:
- Linking puts all the data relevant to the contact in a convenient place where you can view all the data about the contact.
- Linking shares the data with all members of your team,
The Data includes the following:
- Emails
- Notes
- Files (e.g. Scans, Excel files)
- Documents (Text documents created within HQ)
- Calendar Events and Callbacks
- Todos
A contact means a Person or a Business. There is also a third type of entity – a Jobbag. A Jobbag is a collection of data that is not necessarily a contact. For example, a Jobbag could represent a project that you want to link documents and Todos etc. We also use Jobbags to collate our Procedures.
Once data is linked, it is generally viewable in the contact history page (or the Jobbag pages) as an event. The history pages show each data item and the data it occurred. Each of these events is displayed in a time ordered list . The very latest events appear at the top of the history. The page is paginated so to see older events, you will need to navigate to the later pages.
For more complex items, only a summary is given of the data; you will need to click on the event to see the full detail. For example, events showing emails show the recipient and the subject of the email.
Linking Process
Data can often be manually linked to a contact by selecting a link button associated with some of the data items. For example, when you create a todo, callback or calendar event you will have the ability to link it to a contact by typing the name of the contact in the link box and selecting the best match from the option list presented (similar to the quick search).
For emails, the email is usually linked automatically to a contact when the email address is recognised.
To automatically create a link, it is best to create the document from the card (e,g, using the icons on a business card). When you create a document (email, document, file upload etc) from the card, then a link is automatically created and so the new document will appear in the history.
For emails, documents, and files. multiple links can be made. When multiple links are made, there is only a single copy of the document. An example is if a document is created and you want to link that document to multiple people. By selecting multiple people in the email link for example, you are not creating multiple copies of the email in each persons history. You still have a single email but it will appear in each persons history. If the email is deleted, then it will disappear from all contact histories simultaneously.
Access to Shared Data
One a data item is linked, then it can be viewed by anyone with the relevant permissions in your team. How the shared items are viewable depends on a number of factors.
Emails, Documents, Files, Calendar Events and Notes are visible to all your team mates under the contact’s history.
Todos and Jobs are visible in the relevant pods on the contact pages.
Templates are visible on the editor menu .
Personal Log entries are only visible in the search.
Privacy
For data that you wish to remain private, do not link the data to a contact. There are various methods to keep information private without having to remove links. These include:
- Disabling Auto-Linking for Mailboxes (This will prevent any automatic linking on receiving any mail in that mailbox)
- Disabling Auto-Linking for a Contact.
- Clicking on the “Private” checkbox when creating an email.
Other Shareable Data
Any documents stored in the Public folder are available to all with access to the documents.
Notes entered into your Personal Log can also be shared with other users by clicking on the Public checkbox.
Document templates can also be shared with your team if you click on the Public checkbox.
Mailboxes can also be shared between user accounts.