Question

Timelines & Tagging

  • 16 November 2023
  • 6 replies
  • 54 views
ART
Rank

I am incredibly confused with how correspondence is saved to timelines. My understanding is that if an e-mail is received from a certain client (e.g. a corporate entity) it will only be automatically saved to the timeline if it is from the primary contact. There are other people that I send e-mails to in the organisation and I would have thought that their correspondence should be automatically saved to the organisation timeline, if I set them up as a contact? Apparently this is not the case and Karbon is designed like this on purpose but I don’t understand why? Therefore, it becomes a manual process to remember to save e-mails to timelines which is likely to lead to things being missed. Perhaps, I am missing something?

Also, in addition, if you are looking at an entity timeline, is there a way to filter out the correspondence from a certain department that you don’t want to see?    

6 replies

SamG
Rank
Userlevel 7
Badge +15

Also, in addition, if you are looking at an entity timeline, is there a way to filter out the correspondence from a certain department that you don’t want to see?    

When you say from a certain department, what do you mean? A department within your firm? A department within your client? 🙂

Re the rest. My understanding was this - Karbon is designed to add the item to the timeline of every contact included in the email as either an addressee or the contact of any work item the email is added to and the work item timeline.

E.g. if I email Bob Smith, Jane Smith and add the email to work item - 2023 Annual Compliance - Smiths Chips Pty Ltd, Karbon will add the email to the timelines of:
Bob Smith
Jane Smith
2023 Annual Compliance
Smiths Chips Pty Ltd

This makes sense, because if Karbon added it to every organisation that Bob or Jane Smith are a contact on, it could end up being added to the timeline of organisations it doesn’t relate to.

Funnily enough, I don’t think it is working exactly like that… but more on that later

What we do is have a policy that every incoming or outgoing email to a client must be added to a Work item timeline. For some, this is an adhoc work item, 2024 Adhoc - Organisation. This means Karbon adds it to the timelines of the contacts included in the email and the contact of the work item.

I know it’s also possible, if you write the organisation name, it will show as an option to email (e.g. if I type Smiths Chips and select it and it’s bob@smithschips.com.au, it will put the organisation name in the To field rather than Bob Smith) and I would expect that would then put it on the organisation timeline rather than the Bob Smith timeline.. but not sure that’s the only time it does that.

I’ve tested a couple of things - for an email address that is the email on two person contacts and one organisation contact:

  1. When I email To that email address (and select any of the contacts) it is adding it to the timeline of ALL of those contacts - is that because those person contacts have that email address starred and it is the email address set in the organisation?
  2. When I receive an email From that email address, it is adding it ONLY to the Primary Owner contact (as defined whenever I add/edit that email address to any contact).

Does that help? 🙂

max
Rank
Userlevel 7
Badge +19

Interesting. I didn’t know it added it to multiple timelines when sending. Is that also the case for replying? I’ll have to test.

The policy in our firm is that all primary email addresses are assigned to the person contact and not the organization. This helps when a person calls in and our staff look up that person first and then branch out to relevant organizations and/or work items afterwards. We often know who is calling before we know what organization or work item they are calling about, so we want all correspondence to be reflected at minimum on the person contact.

We also make sure that all people are properly attributed to their organizations with a business card on their profile, that way if someone is looking for communications about an organization, they can start on the organization profile and work outwards to the people, if necessary.

Like Sam said, adding an email to work also adds it to the associated organization. With the work item behavior and the rule about making people the primary for email addresses, we have not had email issues. In reality, our email visibility has increased dramatically across the firm compared to what it was when correspondence was hiding away in the managing partner’s inbox, lol.

I believe there are some feature ideas floating around about automatically adding emails to person and organization timelines. I’ve voted for all of them.

respect humans | continually improve
SamG
Rank
Userlevel 7
Badge +15

Interesting. I didn’t know it added it to multiple timelines when sending. Is that also the case for replying? I’ll have to test.

Apparently it does! (see below)

 

max
Rank
Userlevel 7
Badge +19

I have seen that, lol. Below my radar, though.

respect humans | continually improve
ART
Rank

Thanks for the various responses, when I stated department, I meant different departments within my firm. 

SamG
Rank
Userlevel 7
Badge +15

Thanks for the various responses, when I stated department, I meant different departments within my firm. 

I don't believe it is possible. In the global search you can select which colleagues you want included in the search, if that helps 🙂

Reply


Badge winners

Show all badges
Terms & ConditionsCookie settings