The Master Contact Record provides an easy way to organize contacts by a common factor, such as "Company", "Department", "Domain", or some other Address Book field, with contacts that share the same factor inheriting properties from the master record. For example, if you set "Company" as the common factor, then any contacts that are created and that have the same value in the Company field can be populated automatically with values in the Address, City, State, and Zip Code fields. This is useful when creating contacts in the Address Book, entering contact information in an issue, or performing searches.
You must create all of your Master Contact Record fields
before enabling the Master Contact Record feature. Refer
to Address Book Field Maintenance in this
document for complete instructions on creating the fields.
The Master Contact Record is set up from the Field
Maintenance page. It is based on the Organizational Unit. To
have a Master Contact Record, at least one more field must be part of
the Master Contact Record. Address
Book contacts are stored the same way whether the Master Contact Record
feature is or is not enabled, so existing Address Book contact records
are not broken if Master Contact Records are enabled.
NOTE
The Master Contact Record feature does not work with external
address books.
Enable the Master Contact Record Feature
To create a master contact record:
Select Administration
| Address Book | Field Maintenance.
Click the checkbox
marked Check
here to enable the Master Contact Record Feature. At that point, the Organizational Unit label changes to Master Contact Key. In addition, a
pop-up window is displayed explaining that you must select a Master Record Key and associate one or more
fields with it before saving the page. That means you must designate a field as the key that is used to look up associated records and also select additional fields that are to be displayed as part of the Master Contact Record information. For instance, if you select "Company" as the Master Contact Record Key, when you look up Master Contact Records, all the contacts that match the Company field are assembled and the information displayed with those records will be the fields you associated with it, such as Address, City, State, Zip Code, etc. The procedure for associating fields with the record are in the steps below.
Click the OK
button to dismiss the pop-up window.
Edit fields and associate them with Master Contact Records by selecting Yes
from the Associate with radio buttons. To do this, highlight a field in the Field List, click Edit, then click the Yes radio button to associate it with the Master Contact Record. The
feature does not work until you have associated fields with the Master
Contact Record. For example, you could highlight "Address" in the Field List, then click the EDIT button. You would then be able to click a radio button and associate the Address field with the Master Contact Record. You must have at least one field associated with the record for this feature to work.
Check the "Check here to create Master Contact Records from existing Contacts" checkbox if you wish to have Master Contact Records created from the existing contacts in the Address Book. This checkbox is only visible once for each Address Book, when you are first setting up the Master Contact Record feature. After that, if you wish to create a Master Contact Record, you can do so from the Address Book toolbar.
Enter your password
and click Save to
save the changes.
Select an Organizational Unit
For instructions on selecting an Organizational Unit,
refer to Organizational Unit.