Thanks very much Jake!
As I've mentioned often in this forum, I am not a tech wizard, just a teacher of various self-improvement and consultative tools and co-owner of a small publishing company (of training video- and audio programs, plus some consultation and on site training)...
I have grown less and less comfortable with ACT which uses a proprietary data format for storing the notes which effectively hold that data hostage to their application - they do not provide a way to export the Notes en masse.
RE: Other "cloud" solutions... a perusal of their fine print often reveals similar claims to presumed rights to control of one kind or another of my proprietary data, and due to the confidentiality requirements of my profession, these are unacceptable.
Thus I am curious as to what I might be able to accomplish using the increasing flexibility and power of XF, while preserving control of my data - on my server.
First I'm assuming that this Contacts Manager would be a dedicated XF installation
not open to the public, installed on my webserver, with the people associated with my company having Moderator or Super-Moderator rights (with me as Super Admin, plus possibly one or two other Admins).
The actual contacts themselves would be stored as "members" in the XF db, but would have NO rights to view this installation... Strictly internal access within my company operations.
In the near term, I will have to keep track of about 500 to 1000 "companies" - altho I would like to have the option of its growing into the thousands.
Here are my thoughts as far as I've been able to take this idea without training wheels...
Assuming the expanded functionality of 1.1 to add additional fields within the Members area, and the availability of add-ons and plugins such as a Calendar, I'm thinking of a way to keep track of my contacts, tasks, and followups more or less like this:
It seems like I could define each company as a forum and each department within as a subforum... with the number of contacts (treated as "members" in XF I presume) for a given company for the most part usually being from 1 to several... altho in a few instances the number of contacts within a company may be larger.
In the case of an individual client of mine, not associated with a company, maybe it would make sense to have a Forum named
Individuals with each individual having a sub-forum and an associated member name having an identical name. Is there any reason you (or someone else reading this post) can think of that would preclude that configuration?
Below is a screen shot of the Act Contacts Manager Screen. There are lots of clickable tabs in various places but mostly I just use the fields you see populated in the screenshot example.
The upper half is for the most part an individual's contact information within a company, so I presume that data would appear in the XF Members area using a combination of the default fields provided by XF plus additional custom fields I could now define, as need be, including a field containing the name of the forum (i.e. company) associated with that Member.
The exception would be the field named "Company" in ACT which in XF I presume would be a forum name, while a department withIN that company could be defined as a sub-forum.
In the case of a company with no departments, then the Forum name and a single sub-forum name would have the same content.
Does that seem reasonable and practical in your opinion? If not I'd appreciate your suggestion(s) (and those of anyone else reading this thread who cares to comment) for an alternative.
Thanks
very much!
All the best,
HJ