Using Customer And Project Tracking + Usage Reporting E

xtensions
CAPTURE
Version A free CRM application from Asia/Pacific Computer Services
2.1.05 Visit our web site at asiapac.com.au (web server in Australia) or notestracker.com (server in
USA)

The CAPTURE database was designed to be easy to use, so the following guidelines are kept to
a minimum.
Use the additional information incorporated as Help Text, and as "hotspot pop-ups" (identified
by the icon), placed where it is needed throughout the various forms. In many cases this Help
information is visible only when you are editing documents.
The Relationship between CAPTURE Document Types

Parent Customer Profile

\ \ \_________ Mail Memo
\ \
\ \___ Customer Action
\ \________ Mail Memo
\
Customer Profile
| \ \ \_________ Mail Memo
| \ \
| \ \____ Customer Action
| \ \____ Mail Memo
| \
| Contact Profile
| \ \_________ Mail Memo
| \
| \____ Contact Action
| \____ Mail Memo
|
Project Profile
\ \______________ Mail Memo
\
\____ Project Action
\____ Mail Memo

Creating and Editing CAPTURE Documents

To enter a new CUSTOMER PROFILE in the database:

First make sure that the customer does not already have a Customer Profile document in the
database. For example, select the view "Companies by Name" and then type the first few
characters in the company name. If a Customer Profile document already exists, you will see it.
If the customer does not have a Customer Profile document, select Create - Customer Profile to
create one. Fill in the basic description of the customer (name, address, etc) and then other
details (positioning information, our relationship with the customer, products used by the
customer, and any useful background information about the customer). Save the document.
Only when you have created a Customer Profile (company profile) document can you proceed to
adding projects, contacts and action items against that customer. This prevents you from adding
"orphan" projects and action items.

To enter a new CONTACT PROFILE or PROJECT PROFILE:

Open the Customer Profile document and then click on the New Contact button or the New
Project button respectively. Key relevant information from the Customer Profile document
(name, Sales Rep, etc) will be inherited into corresponding fields in the Contact Profile or
Project Profile document. Some of these are fixed, others (such as address or phone number)
are editable. Fill in the additional fields on the form. Finally, save the document.

To enter an ACTIVITY against a customer, contact or project:

Open the appropriate Customer Profile, Contact Profile or Project Profile document, then click
on the Activity button. There are four different form types in the database which you can use to
record different kinds of activity between us and the customer:
Action Item (including the assignment of tasks and the controlling of their timely resolution)
Phone Call Report (whether initiated by us or by the customer/prospect)
Sales Call Report (when you meet with the customer/prospect)
Miscellaneous Activity (anything not covered by the above three items)

Automatic Header Field Synchronisation:

At the top of each customer-related document is a common header section that holds basic
information about the customer. For example:
There is an important but not-so-obvious feature of CAPTURE needs a mention. Whenever you
change any of these fields (Customer Name, Parent Customer Name, Customer Category,
Sales Branch Location, Sales Region or Sales Representative Name), the changed field values
are automatically propagated down to all of the descendant documents of the Customer Profile
(projects, contacts, actions, etc). More than that, these fields are only editable from within the
Customer Profile, so this propagation mechanism leads to consistency of information in the
descendant documents.
In CAPTURE Version 2,1 a "special" comments field was added to each form, enabling you to
highlight individual documents in the database and have special actions performed against them
(see later, in the section about NotesTracker).
Note: throughout CAPTURE, while editing documents you are encouraged to us the Spell
Check button so as to improve the quality of your documents.

To merge a Notes Mail memo into the CAPTURE document hierarchy

Beginning with Version 2.0 you have the powerful capability to select any document (or
documents) in the CAPTURE hierarchy -- a Customer Profile, a Contact Profile, a Project
profile, or any Action against one of these -- and then insert one or more of the memos in the
Inbox of your personal Notes Mail immediately below the selected document (or documents).
In most cases you would merge a single Notes Mail memo against a single CAPTURE
document, but you are not restricted from merging multiple memos against multiple documents.
Note that you cannot merge a mail memo against a previously-merged memo.
An example of the simple merge procedure now follows. First, you select the CAPTURE
document below which the memo is to be inserted. You can do this by highlighting the document
with the dark rectangle, for example the phone call with subject "Introduce new version of
JADE":

Note: you could also use the selection margin and place a check mark (tick) against the desired
CAPTURE document (or even against multiple documents anywhere in the hierarchy).
Next, you click on the e-Mail Merge button (circled in red), which presents the following
confirmation dialog:

Assuming that you click on the "Yes" button, you will see the contents of your own Notes Mail inbox,
looking something like this:

If you click the Cancel button at this stage, you procedure is cancelled and no mail merge occurs:

If you click the Okay button instead, the mail memo document that is highlighted (via the dark
rectangle) will be merged into CAPTURE. If you don't want his to happen, select one (or more) of your
mail memos using the selection margin, like this:
Next, click the "Okay" button. You will be offered a final chance to drop out of the mail merge
procedure:

If you click the "No" button, then you will be given confirmation that the procedure was cancelled:

Otherwise. you will see that selected mail memo(s) merged underneath the desired CAPTURE
document, like this:
You will find that this mail merge procedure is very quick and easy to use. It is a far more convenient
and efficient way to incorporate vital information from your Notes Mail than other alternatives (such as
cutting and pasting text).

Activities and Action Items

Against each Customer Profile, Project Profile or Contact Profile you may log one or multiple
"activities" (which are stored as child documents, or in Lotus Notes terminology "response
documents"). You create an Activity document by clicking on the New Activity button:

This causes display of a dialog box from which you select the type of activity, as follows:
If you select, for example, the "Action Item" task type, then a new Action Item form is displayed, which
for a Project Profile parent document might look like the following:
You select the person(s) with primary responsibility for the Action Item by clicking one of the
following buttons:

which presents the list of names stored via the "Sales Reps" lookup list views (under
ADMINISTRATION). Otherwise, you may type the name(s) directly into the Assigned To field. (You
must keep in mind that these must be valid Lotus Notes mail addressees.) Starting with CAPTURE
Version 2.1.05 you may also select secondary assignee(s) who will also be alerted about the Action
Item by e-mail.

An important feature of Action Item documents is the ability to have alert Notes Mail messages sent
out, both for the initial creation of the Action Item document and for any subsequent modifications of
an existing Action Item document. Whether or not an alert mail message is sent out is governed by the
Yes/No setting of the radio button as follows :

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Securing and Configuring the CAPTURE database

 Security
Note: with Version 2.0. the CAPTURE database comes with its ACL (Access Control List)
set as follows:
When you put CAPTURE into production you must modify the ACL appropriately to meet
your own security and functional requirements. This is "business as usual" for any Notes
database -- you must control who is allowed to read, create, edit and delete documents (or
even delete the entire database)!

Notice the [Admin] and [NotesTracker] roles, are new as of CAPTURE Version 2.0 and are
explained below.

Note: To better encourage secure local copies of the database (for example, on a travelling
sales representative's notebook computer), the Access Control List has -- in its "Advanced"
section -- the property "Enforce a consistent Access Control List across all replicas of the
database". (This might cause you some problems in accessing the database, so you must
properly understand how this setting works.)
 CONFIGURING THE DATABASE:
A user must have Manager-level access or be in the [Admin] role before being able to:
- edit the CAPTURE Database Profile document
- edit any of the Lookup List documents

 The CAPTURE Database Profile

The database profile document (added in Version 1.1) allows you to set up several
database-wide variables related to your organization's environment: the organization's
name, whether instead of "customer" you use a term such as "member" or "client" or
"associate" or "partner", and so on. You can set the various values in these lists via the
Administration function (that is, by editing Lookup Lists).

Starting with CAPTURE Version 2.1 you can also specify the refresh interval for the
Breaking News view, previously fixed at 60 seconds but now configurable between five
seconds and two hours.

You create/edit the database profile by running (from the Action menu):
Edit the CAPTURE database profile
Starting with CAPTURE Version 2.1.01, the value that you select for the "Customer
designation" field displays in the title field of the "Customer Profile" document. In the above
example "Member" is selected as the designation, therefore you would see "MEMBER
PROFILE" as circled in pink in the illustration that follows. This is an improvement on prior
versions of CAPTURE, where the heading "CUSTOMER PROFILE" was always displayed
no matter what was the "customer" designation..

Note: Unfortunately, it is not possible (in current versions of Lotus Notes) to cause an
alternative designation to appear in the navigator on the left of the display. You will always
see the designation "Customer" here:
 Lookup Lists

CAPTURE adopts a "table-driven" approach for selectable items, so as to provide you with
flexibility in the way you use the database. For example, if yours is a manufacturing and
distribution company, most likely you have "sales representatives" and "projects". If yours is
a multimedia/advertising group, then you might instead have "account executives" and
"campaigns". CAPTURE uses tables of names -- or "lookup lists" -- that allow you to tailor
the terminology used for such things. If the provided lookup lists don't quite meet your
needs, please contact us and request a change in the database design. We will consider
enhancing the design, if your request is not too complex and fits into the CAPTURE design
philosophy of providing widely useful function while retaining simplicity of structure and
operation.

Most of the forms in the CAPTURE database contain multi-value lists, and it is the content of
these that you control by editing various Lookup List documents. Here is an example of the
entire set of Lookup List documents, followed by an example of the possible entries in the
"Sales Rep Designation" lookup list:

Starting with CAPTURE Version 2.0 only people having the [Admin] role can see the
administration views, one of which is the Lookup Lists view:
To create a new Lookup List document, click on the Create new Lookup List document
button, select the type of lookup list by clicking on a radio button at the top (such as
"Customer Category") and enter the desired values in the list at the bottom of the form, like
this:
Click on the Save button to save the list values, and on the Close button to exit the Lookup
List document.

Note: as you might expect, you are prevented from saving more than a single Lookup List
document for a given type (such as Customer Category).

Select an existing "Lookup List" document such as "Sales Rep Designation" and click on the
Edit Highlighted doc. button in order to amend it. Notice that the radio buttons are not
displayed for an existing document:

If one of the Lookup List documents is missing, you will see the message "(lookup list error)
" and will know that you have to arrange with the database administrator (somebody having
the [Admin] role) for the creation of a Lookup List document for that particular field.

Note: in the special case of the Currency field, you should enter the values like this,:
Notice in this illustration the Document Revision History at the bottom, to keep you informed
in a simple fashion about who updated each Lookup List document and when.

When you edit the currency field in a Project Profile document, the entire list displays
exactly as shown in the Lookup List document, but only the part to the left of the Equals
symbol is stored in the Project Profile. For example. "STL = Pounds Sterling" would be
stored as just "STL", like this:
This makes the abbreviations used for foreign currencies less cryptic.
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About NotesTracker, and its use within CAPTURE

TM
NotesTracker is a unique software development toolkit (SDK) from Asia/Pacific Computer Services,
and you can enjoy its benefits in the CAPTURE database.

When NotesTracker is included in the design of a database -- such as CAPTURE -- you can precisely
and comprehensively understand document usage in the database. both at a broad level (showing
document usage trends) and at a highly-detailed level (potentially every action performed against
every document in the database by every user).

CAPTURE Version 2.2 incorporated NotesTracker Version 5.0 with its numerous enhancements.

Some of the many possible applications of NotesTracker are:

 Content Effectiveness and Timeliness - see who accessed a specific "hot" document (like a
New Product Release, HR Policy, Discussion Topic, Meeting announcement, or Security alert)
 Content and Knowledge Management - determine the main knowledge contributors, and see
how content is being changed
 Recognising Knowledge Contributors / Team Building - use NotesTracker to easily measure
contributions and promote knowledge sharing
 Document Life Cycles and Usage Trends - identify popular content, determine usage
patterns, know when "stale" documents should be freshened, identify rarely-used documents
that are safe candidates for deletion or archiving
 Domino Administration - monitor changes in critical databases (such as Server Documents),
build dynamic Alert views
 Notes Design and Development - discover the heavily used forms and views, so worth fine
tuning (or even views worth removing)
 Application Usability and Evaluation - audit a database to see if it is being used as intended
 Workflow tracking, Troubleshooting, Help Desk - solve issues like "Who wrongly changed my
travel request?" or "Who changed my customer's credit limit?" or "Who deleted my recent
Expense Claim document?"
 Training Effectiveness - follow the trail of a student's database usage, to measure and
enhance application training
 News Feeds - display the latest Notes documents on your corporate intranet and Internet
portals - construct dynamic Breaking News and What's New embedded filter views. There is a
sample Breaking News view in this CAPTURE database.
 Security Audit - detect undesirable or suspicious database activity and unwanted field
changes or document deletions.
 "Special" documents - you can nominate documents as being especially important, for any
reason, merely by typing some meaningful/relevant text into the "Special Comments" field
(which appears on most of the forms).
These important documents are highlighted via a red exclamation mark in the views.
 Receive e-mail alerts for specified actions (Create, Update, Delete, etc), and also ffor
"special" documents. The e-mails can be sent immediately, or via a scheduled agent (delayed
and delivered some time later according top the agent's schedule setting).
  Track actions performed only by specified users rather an everybody using the database.
(This is a new NotesTracker V5.0 feature.)

This is not the appropriate place to describe NotesTracker in detail. General information about
NotesTracker can be viewed at the Asia/Pacific Computer Services web site, from either of:
** http://asiapac.com.au/UsageMetrics.htm
** http://notestracker.com/UsageMetrics.htm

The NotesTracker Guide is the main source of information about NotesTracker and its administration.
You can download a free copy of the guide from either of:
**
http://asiapac.com.au/UsageTracker_Download.htm#NOTESTRACKER_DOCUMENTATION
**
http://notestracker.com/UsageTracker_Download.htm#NOTESTRACKER_DOCUMENTATION

In Version 2.0 of CAPTURE, a set of typical NotesTracker usage views have been built in, thus:
Note: only people having the [NotesTracker] role can see the usage tracking views (circled in red),
and only people having the [Admin] role (circled in green) can edit the NotesTracker Configuration
Document and access the NotesTracker archive procedure.
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The "Breaking News" View

From Version 2 onwards, the CAPTURE database includes a "Breaking News" or "What's New" view
capability, which presents you with all those documents in the CAPTURE database that have been
created or updated (via either a Lotus Notes Client or a web browser). The documents are presented
in descending time sequence, with the most recent additions/updates at the top of the view. For the
Lotus Notes Client only, this view is automatically refreshed every 60 seconds, and the "selected
document" pointer is moved back to the top of the view (thereby highlighting the most recently
created/updated document -- the latest arrival in the view).
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"Special Documents" and e-Mail Alerts

From CAPTURE Version 2.1 onwards, the database incorporates NotesTracker Version 5.0, which
leads to a number of extremely useful capabilities. (Refer to the NotesTracker Guide Version 5.0 for a
full description.)

One of these is the ability to specify (in the NotesTracker Configuration document) that e-mail alerts
should be sent out whenever various actions occur (such as fields being updated, a document being
deleted, a document being pasted into the database, and so on).

Another enhancement is being able to enter any meaningful text (for any reason that is useful or
important to you) into a "Special document" comments field (which has been added to the Level1
through Level5 and Memo forms). Such documents are highlighted in the CAPTURE views by means
of a red exclamation mark in the leftmost column. This makes it very easy for you to notice any
"special" documents.
You can specify that the e-mail alerts are either "immediate" (sent out at the time that the action
occurs) or "scheduled" (queued for sending in batches, via a scheduled agent. Because the
CAPTURE database is distributed as freeware, its design is hidden so that the built-in NotesTracker
commercial code is not visible to non-paying (unlicensed) users. This raises a small problem for , the
free CAPTURE version. The e-mail alerting agent is distributed in unscheduled mode in order not to
disrupt normal operations of your Domino production servers. Due to the hidden design, the
CAPTURE administrator cannot even see the agent and certainly cannot switch it to run at any
scheduled interval.

Therefore in CAPTURE Version 2.11 a button was added to the alerts views, as shown circled in blue
in the following illustration

The button is visible only to people having the [Admin] role. When clicked, it runs the e-mail alerting
agent, and (assuming no errors) you see the following dialog box:

You should see that the unsent e-mail messages have changed to "Sent" status, like this:
On the whole, with CAPTURE it is probably easier to select the "immediate" mode for the sending of
alert messages. (The "scheduled" mode was designed to offer a modest performance improvement for
heavily-utilized Domino servers, and there may be little difference between the delivery modes in most
circumstances,)
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