1. Promote all your Secondary Contacts to Contacts
2. Create a Company record for all the companies where there are more than one contact
3. Associate all the Contacts to the relevant Company record.
My view is that secondary contacts should be used sparingly, if at all. By promoting your secondary contacts to contacts and connecting to Companies you get all the benefits of being able to attach emails to them indicidually, associate tasks etc. You can then go to the Companies record and view the history of all the contacts in the one view.
As the functionality you are after is in place I would say that Sage won't be adding the functionality that you are after to the secondary contacts. I have seen demos and some info on version 12 (2010) and it certainly doesn't appear to be in that version so you will have a long wait if they do decide to add it in future versions.
The question is how do you re-arrange your database to use contacts and companies rather than contacts and secondary contacts. It depends on the size of your database. I recently did a project for a client that had to do the same thing. They had about 1200 contacts with an average of 10 secondary contacts per contact. It wasn't feasable to do it manually so we used some 3rd party utilities to do the job. There are a couple of different add-ons you could use. I would check out www.rowcol.co.uk for there bulk secondary contact promotion utility for a start.
Might be worth finding and experience local ACT! Certified Consultant to discuss this project. Although there will be an associated expense for getting them involved it will allow you to hand over the responsibility of getting it done right and getting it done quick.
DJ,
The best bet for you is to:
1. Promote all your Secondary Contacts to Contacts
2. Create a Company record for all the companies where there are more than one contact
3. Associate all the Contacts to the relevant Company record.
My view is that secondary contacts should be used sparingly, if at all. By promoting your secondary contacts to contacts and connecting to Companies you get all the benefits of being able to attach emails to them indicidually, associate tasks etc. You can then go to the Companies record and view the history of all the contacts in the one view.
As the functionality you are after is in place I would say that Sage won't be adding the functionality that you are after to the secondary contacts. I have seen demos and some info on version 12 (2010) and it certainly doesn't appear to be in that version so you will have a long wait if they do decide to add it in future versions.
The question is how do you re-arrange your database to use contacts and companies rather than contacts and secondary contacts. It depends on the size of your database. I recently did a project for a client that had to do the same thing. They had about 1200 contacts with an average of 10 secondary contacts per contact. It wasn't feasable to do it manually so we used some 3rd party utilities to do the job. There are a couple of different add-ons you could use. I would check out www.rowcol.co.uk for there bulk secondary contact promotion utility for a start.
Might be worth finding and experience local ACT! Certified Consultant to discuss this project. Although there will be an associated expense for getting them involved it will allow you to hand over the responsibility of getting it done right and getting it done quick.
Cheers, Darren Flood.