Update to Aurora Contacts (1/10/08) Contacts are obviously an integral part of your business and if they aren't accurate everything from your management reports to your marketing can be affected. We know it's time consuming to clean up your contacts database and frustrating when it doesn't stay that way.
The next Aurora update, currently scheduled for late February 2008, will contain a complete Contacts overhaul. We’ll have an alpha pre-release version of the new Aurora Contacts available for download very soon. If you’re interested in trying out the new version of Contacts before it’s released to all customers, send an email to wtcontacts@alamode.com.
The update to Aurora contacts will include:
A Contacts Cleanup Wizard
Many WinTOTAL customers have had issues with duplicate contact cluttering their database, and with synchronization with an XSite when there are multiple appraisers. So you need a way to clean up the database and keep it that way. You also need a way to update the contacts tied to reports so that your duplicates are never re-introduced.
To that end, we've built a Contacts Cleanup Wizard, available in the Contacts PowerView of the Appraisal Desktop. The Contacts Cleanup Wizard will:
Consolidate all your contacts from your XSite and your WinTOTAL presenting a master list of all contacts. This will ensure that you're fixing both your WinTOTAL contacts and your XSite contacts at once. You won't have to worry about a synchronization undoing all your cleanup work.
Allow you to group your companies and contacts to easily find duplicates. For instance, if you have 5 contacts all with the name John Doe, you’ll be able to group on first name, find all 5 contacts, and then select them all to merge into one contact.
Allow you to start the process of cleaning up your contacts and come back at a later date to finish it. We understand that even with this new tool, you may not want to clean up your entire database at once. You can start and come back later, picking up where you left off.
Once the Cleanup Wizard is done, Aurora will take all the changes you made and apply them to both your local contacts database and your XSites contacts database. It will also fix the association of the "clean" contacts to reports, making sure they're tied to the correct report. In many cases, this will fix your reporting issues whether you use an XSite or WinTOTAL Desktop Billing. Keep in mind that we never change the actual text that’s inside the report. We just fix the relationship between the report and the contact to make sure you no longer have reports tied to the duplicate contacts you just cleaned up.
Once you've run the Contacts Cleanup Wizard and have a clean database, you can merge duplicate contacts directly from the Contacts PowerView as needed.
A new type of contact - Ad Hoc Contacts Many of the previous duplication issues were caused by typing the contact information directly into the order form in a report instead of choosing one from the drop-down. WinTOTAL would assume you wanted this to be a contact and would create one for you when the report was synchronized to your XSite.
With this release of Contacts, WinTOTAL will no longer make any assumptions. If text is typed in the order form in the Lender, Client, Bill To, Ship To, Appraiser, or Supervisor fields, you'll be prompted to create an Ad Hoc contact when you save. They're called Ad Hoc contacts because WinTOTAL can’t verify if the contact in the database. Inside the Contacts PowerView you'll see a new group called Ad Hoc to let
you view these entries. Also, both XSite and Desktop Billing management reports
keep track of files and invoices tied to Ad Hoc contacts.
net.X Connect now has Contact Synchronization
For those of you that use an XSite, we ’ve moved the contact synchronization process into net.X Connect. Every time you synchronize your orders, you'll be synchronizing contacts as well. We’ve alsoincreased the speed of contact synchronization tremenedously, and added the ability to resolve conflicts between contacts used in different reports if needed. You'll be prompted when we detect that a contact has been changed in both locations and asks you to pick the right one.
The new contact synchronization also performs a one-to-one match between your WinTOTAL contacts database and your XSite contacts database. No longer will you have different results depending on where you’re viewing your contacts.
The XSite contact manager privilege For those of you that use an XSite and have multiple appraisers
sharing your XSite, you'll have the ability to assign certain individuals as contact managers. These individuals will be the only ones in your company with permission to add a shared contact that every other XSite user can utilize. If you have one or two people that you’ve entrusted with this task and want to eliminate many of the duplicates that remote offices can introduce, this new feature is a must.
If you have any questions about the new contacts release in Aurora, shoot us an e-mail to wtcontacts@alamode.com.
