Adding Attachments to an Organisation

[Darren Rose]

Hello

We're currently using Organisations in Service Manager to keeping our Service Partners information - key contacts, support email addresses etc... It would be really useful to be able to add attachments against an Organisation so that I could attach the Service Agreement, or other such documents to the Organisation. 

Is this function something that could be added? 

Thanks

Darren 

[Guest Chaz]

This functionality is available through the Customer Manager application which enhances the functionality around Organisations. You also get the ability to do the following, and more:

• Add members to Organisations
• Provide updates to a timeline
• Associate documents from Document Manager
• Create activities

[Steven Boardman]

Hi @Darren Rose

There are a couple of options here.

1. Organisations and Contacts are provided as part of the collaboration functionality and provide the basic information and capabilities.  We then have the Hornbill Customer Manager app which can be installed and this enhances the functionality which is available against each organisation.

* Add Attachments

* Link Documents

* Schedule Activities

* Add Members

* Add a Timeline for collaborating on the organisation 

An example of this is shown below:

Other features are constantly being added and one example which will be added is service contracts. 

Customer Manager is a app which carries a monthly subscription and is £19 per user per month. 

2. Alternatively if you don't have a need for all of the above functionality you could do possibly achieve what you need with the existing organisation record, the use of Document Manager (free app) and custom buttons.

So in the example below i have done the following

1. I have added the document i want to link to Document Manager (from here i can revise it, share it, collaborate on it, se review dates etc)

2. I then use the form designer on the organisation record to use a custom field to the 'Extra' details section to hold the document reference id  in this example 'DOC20160800000001' this field does not need to be visible in the extra details section i have just shown it for example purposes.

3. Using the Custom buttons option at the top add a new button which in my example opens the document. To create a new Custom button click on custom buttons, give the button a name, colour, icon etc and then define the URL - in my example it is as follows, where <template> is your instance name and [h_custom_4] is the custom field in which the document name is held on the organisation record https://live.hornbill.com/template/docmanager/document/details/[[h_custom_4]]  

This approach allows you to add a specific type of document to each and every organisation record and as the custom button is passing through the custom field variable, it will open the relevant document in document manager based on the document id held in this field on each org record. 

You can of course repeat this for other documents and use other custom fields and custom buttons. 

Alternatively there is the Customer Manager app which gives you both attachments, a document upload link and more, but hopefully some things to think about

Steve

 

 

 

 

 

[Darren Rose]

Thanks for the reply @Steven Boardman and I thought you might say about Customer Manager

I'll use the Custom Button Workaround option, which I had already done to take me to the doc library, but see if I can improve it with the tips you've provided.

thanks

Darren 

[m.vandun]

@Steven Boardman

Are there any plans to upgrade the amount of custom fields? We are currently out of fields

Kind regards,
Mark

[Steven Boardman]

@m.vandun good question let me ask the question and get you a response, out of interest how many over and above the existing 8 would you think would be needed?

Steve

[m.vandun]

@Steven Boardman For me I would have enough, for now , with 4 more. I could do with 3 , if I would have the option to select and see which services the customer has with us.

[Steven Boardman]

@m.vandun we'll look at add an additional 4 custom fields, watch out for the release notes on updates for when these filter through our release cycle. 

 

[Gerry]

@m.vandun

In our experience, doing this kind of thing using custom fields gets messy and out of hand quite quickly. We are limited by how far we can expand the number of custom fields to maintain efficiency.  That aside, there are better ways of achieving what you need.  In Customer Manager we have added the notion of Contracts and Supported Items, this is what we use ourselves to know which service contracts and products (in the case of our on-premise software) a customer has that we are supporting. We tried (and failed) to represent this information in custom fields but our data ended up being a mess, leaving our admin team to revert back to spreadsheets. 

I would suggest you consider looking at what Customer Manager can do for you. Customer Manager is not something we lead with so marketing collateral is scarce. However, being a software/products company that also provides support services Customer Manager has been built for "Companies Like Us", and we use it in anger.  I believe its data model would lend its self very well to your needs - its worth taking a look i would suggest.  I am the acting product owner for Customer Manager so I am happy to answer any questions you have.

Gerry