Overview of the Company and Person Data Sets

A Company data set brings company contacts into a specified source folder. A Person data set brings person contacts into a specified source folder.

When transforming companies or people, Application Collaboration does one of the following for each contact harvested from the external system:

  • Claim the contact - Application Collaboration either adds a new contact in InterAction in the designated source folder or updates an existing InterAction contact. The contact is externally owned by a single data source and is designated with a SYS_ID.
  • Do not claim the contact - Application Collaboration either adds a new contact in InterAction in the designated source folder or updates an existing InterAction contact. However, the contact is not externally owned by a data source and the contact contains no SYS_ID.

For more information on SYS_IDs, see Uniquely Identifying Companies and People. For more information on mapping, see Mapping Contacts Between Your External Data Sources and InterAction. For more information on claiming, see To Claim or Not to Claim.

In addition, Application Collaboration can link the contact into a designated include folder.

The company and person data sets only update contact name information. To update additional fields, addresses, and other information, you use separate data sets. For details about name information, see What is Name Information in InterAction?.

Each data source can have at most one company data set and one person data set. Creating a company or person data set creates a corresponding table. You harvest the company or person data into this table. For a complete reference of the structure for these tables, see Company Data Set Table and Person Data Set Table.

What is Name Information in InterAction?

When discussing Application Collaboration, the term name information refers to more than just a person’s first and last name. It actually refers to all the basic information stored with a firm contact.

For a person, this includes the following fields:

  • Title (Mr., Mrs., Ms., etc.)
  • First Name
  • Middle Name
  • Last Name
  • Suffix
  • Job Title
  • Goes By
  • Department
  • Assistant Name

For a company, this includes the following fields:

  • Company Name
  • Company Known As

Choosing Between Companies and People

Each firm contact in InterAction is either a person or a company. When populating InterAction with data from an external system, you need to decide which kind of contact to create. You can’t create both people and companies from the same data set. You harvest the data into two separate data set tables.

Depending on the external system or source of import data, this decision may be very easy - for example, when integrating with a human resources system, create person contacts.

When integrating with an accounting or time and billing system, this decision depends on how you can manipulate the data in the external system. Clients in InterAction can be either people or companies, although they are usually companies. If you can distinguish between company clients and person clients in the external system, then you can use Application Collaboration to create both company and person contacts. If this is not possible, bring all clients into InterAction as companies.

Note: Many accounting systems use the terms clients and contacts. The corresponding terms in InterAction are companies and people. A contact in InterAction can be either a company or a person.

Note that a person who works for a client is not considered a client in InterAction - he or she is considered client personnel.