Contacts and Users

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COMPANIES, CONTACTS, DEPARTMENTS

Companies TOC
Companies and Departments
Contacts and Users

In dotProject terminology, a User is somebody with login access to dotProject. They can have a contact record associated with their username and password or login record. A contact is not somebody who can login to dotProject, but has an address “card” recorded. Contacts can be attached to projects and/or tasks to receive general updates, but they cannot be assigned to actively work on any tasks. Users can be assigned to work on tasks as they have access to dotProject and can manage their workload.

In recent versions of dotProject we have been gradually working to correct some design difficulties which resulted in completely separate records for Contacts and Users. Because of this you may find that users who were created in older versions of dotProject will not have an associated contact record.

Any users that are created in recent versions automatically have the option to generate a contact record for them, but as user maintenance is a system administration function we have not included any further details on how this is done in this manual.

1 Contact Module Listing
2 Creating, Editing and Deleting Contacts
3 To be Completed for this Page
4 Return to User Manual
5 Footnotes

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1 Contact Module Listing

The main contact module listing shows all of the contact records in your system.

At the top of the screen there are some search and display options.

The alphabetical listing at the top of the screen provides a quick link to filtering the contact listing. Click on any of the alpha characters to show only those contacts with a last name that starts with that letter (you will notice that some options are highlighted in blue to indicate that there are matches).

The search option will automatically match whatever characters you enter against all contact fields.

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2 Creating, Editing and Deleting Contacts

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2.1 Creating A Contact

A contact record can be created via:

- new item - > Contact^[1]
Contact Module > new contact button on the top right
Contact Tab on Project Detail Screen

Most of the fields on this screen are self-explanatory, although you will notice that there are two links [use in display] included on the screen.

You can click on either of those options to transfer the contents of the related fields to the Display Name field (or you can manually enter a Display Name).

The first link - beside Last Name will automatically set Display Name to LastName, FirstName.

The second link - beside Company will automatically set Display Name to the same value as the Company field.

Display Name sets the way that the contact record is sorted / displayed in the contacts module.

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2.2 Private Contacts

You can set a contact to be private, in which case other users will not be able to see the entry regardless of their user permissions / roles. Those contacts can be assigned to a project and/or task as per any other contact (obviously only by the person who "owns" the contact), and they will receive task log updates etc that are sent to contacts, although the user sending the logs will not know they are there.

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2.3 Contact Import Options

A vcard option for importing standardised address records is included as is a CSV export to extract a copy of all contact details.

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2.4 Editing a Contact

There is an edit option beside each contact, which will allow you to edit the contact record.

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2.5 Deleting a Contact

There is a delete option on the right hand side of the edit contact screen. Select the contact you wish to delete, select edit and then select delete.

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2.6 Listing Associated Projects

There is a (Projects) option which will be displayed beside a Contact that has been associated with any Projects. Click on that link to take you straight to a project listing.

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2.7 Emailing Contacts

You notice that the email addresses for the contacts are highlighted in blue. Clicking on any of those links should automatically open an outgoing email address (provided your email client is set up correctly).

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2.8 Importing a vCard file

This option imports one vcard at a time at present and is accessed from the main contacts screen - option to the right hand side of the screen:

Import vCard

Select this link and the system will display another screen asking for you to browse to / enter the name of the file to be uploaded. Remember that you will need to enter the full pathname for dotProject to be able to locate your vcard.

Once you have done that then select submit to upload the contact information.

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2.9 CSV Download

This option exports a CSV list of all contacts in your database. Click on the link on the main contacts screen - option to the right hand side of the screen and follow the onscreen prompts from there.

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