Contacts by Country [ Edited ]

[AlexLeadingEdge]

I have a customer who has just bought ACT! Premium and they would like me to create a Group called 'Contacts by Country" and then under this group they would like sub-groups with every country that their contacts are in. Is it possible to automate this or must I manually create each country and then create a Lookup for Country=<Country> ?

They're an export company so this is important to them.

[ch1p · Accepted solution]

To create the groups easily export the drop-down for countries to a file. Now import that file back into Groups - job done.

As far as automating links from contacts to groups it will mean creating a dynamic rule for each one but worth the effort if you want this to work.

[Roy_Laudenslager]

You would need to create each group manually and set the dynamic membership for that country.

[AlexLeadingEdge]

That is what I've done in the demo but as you may know there are 196 countries in the world

[JasonD]

I wrote some code before that joined a client to a group based on the type of activity they had, so i dont see why you cant do something similar that checked the contacts country and then joins them to it automatically
It should also be possible to automatically create the groups as well

[GLComputing]

Just a question - Why do they need the groups?
How are they using them, as opposed to doing Lookups?

[ch1p · Accepted solution]

To create the groups easily export the drop-down for countries to a file. Now import that file back into Groups - job done.

As far as automating links from contacts to groups it will mean creating a dynamic rule for each one but worth the effort if you want this to work.

[AlexLeadingEdge]

Hi Ch1p,

Thank you for your reply. I have managed to import all the countries. I will now start a long process of creating a dynamic lookup for every country and permissions. *sigh*

[AlexLeadingEdge]

Just a question - Why do they need the groups? How are they using them, as opposed to doing Lookups?

User preference / to make life easier for them and their thinking / company processes already in place.

The customer has set up Outlook with a folder for every country they export to and all emails come into a specific email account and follow certain rules to put them into those country folders. Specific folders are then shared (using Outlook) to certain staff who deal with certain countries so they don't have to worry about non-relevant emails / customers. The process took them weeks to set up but it works well for them.

Now the emails all import into ACT! and they end up with no permissions. They want to sort them back into countries so they can use permissions again to restrict certain staff to certain countries, again so that the staff don't have to worry about emails / customers outside of their jurisdiction.

[bobk250]

Once you create your first Country Group you can then Duplicate it making sure you check the box to duplicate ALL fields. This will bring over a duplicate group with the criteria already in place. Then you just change the Country value in the criteria and in the Group name and you are done and on to the next Country.