The Base System comprises the “contact management” functionality of MX-Contact (as opposed to the more advanced “CRM” functionality). The Base System allows you to maintain details of companies, contacts, groups (of companies and/or contacts), and the interactions with these companies and contacts, namely Appointments (Calendar), Tasks, Journals, E-Mail and Documents. These are described in more detail below:

17.2.1               Companies

The Companies folder is used to store the company name, address(es), web site address, multiple phone numbers, and any other profiling information that relates to the company, such as industry, type or status.

The Company form records the common information required to identify, locate and categorise a company, on both “General” and “Profile” tabs:

The Profile tab contains user-defined fields that are used to store information that will help you to profile the companies in your database. These fields can contain picklists that will ensure that all users select from the same list when entering information.

17.2.2               Contacts

The Contacts is where a listing is kept of all the contacts that one deals with, both individuals and company contacts. Multiple contacts can be added per company. All the standard demographic and personal information can be maintained per contact, including the person’s name, address(es), e-mail, multiple phone numbers, and any other profiling information that relates to the contact, such as type or status.

The Profile tab contains user-defined fields that are used to store information that will help you to profile the contacts in your database. These fields can contain picklists that will ensure that all users select from the same list when entering information.

17.2.3               Associations/Relationships

MX-Contact incorporates the facility to link one item with an infinite number of other items, this establishing the “relationships” that define a Customer “Relationship” Management System. So a contact can be linked to any number of companies, opportunities, journals, documents, orders etc.

The Association folders are used to link multiple company, contact, user and team records that are linked or related to a particular company, contact etc. Association Folders allow many-to-many relationships to be created between items. That is, one company can be linked to many contacts, but likewise one contact can be linked to many companies. These association tabs appear in the bottom section of the Company and Contact Forms (General Tab).

17.2.4               Groups

The Base System of MX-Contact also contains a folder called Groups. This is for recording details about groups of companies and/or contacts. A Company Group for example would be a collection of companies all belonging to the same Holding/Parent Company. A Contact Group is a collection of contacts linked by some common bond, such as a family unit, a committee, board of directors, etc.

17.2.5               Calendaring

Users continue to schedule Meetings and Appointments in their personal Calendar in the same way that they’re used to, except that that they have the additional facility to link an appointment to a Company, Contact, etc.

The only visible difference when scheduling an appointment are the links to various companies, contacts and users that are seen both in the Contacts field at the bottom of an Appointment form and in the Links dropdown on an additional toolbar that MX-Contact adds at the top of the form:

These linked appointments are seamlessly copied to the MX-Contact Public Folders so that anyone in the organisation can see who has scheduled activities with various clients.

17.2.6               Task Management

Likewise users continue to utilise their Outlook Tasks to manage not only personal to-do’s but also tasks that reflect actions that need to be taken for a particular company or contact. These tasks are still stored in the responsible user’s Personal Tasks folder but a copy is (automatically) maintained in the MX-Contact Tasks folder so that Account Managers can monitor who is doing what for each client.

17.2.7               Contact History/Activity Tracking (Journals)

Journal Entries record details of events and activities that have taken place with a particular Company or Contact. They can also be linked to any other relevant item (Opportunities, Events, etc.)

17.2.8               Document Management

Any kind of document (Word, Excel, pdf, jpg, etc.) can be linked to a Company, Contact, Opportunity, etc. so that anyone can track the correspondence relating to a customer/supplier.

Existing documents can either be linked or attached to a document item.

If linked, the documents are stored on the Windows File System either in a central folder or in multiple folders as required.

If the documents are stored as attachments they are stored in the Documents folder of MX-Contact.

Documents can be generated using the Create New Document tab.

The name, address, etc. is inserted automatically into the Word document using Bookmarks in the template.

17.2.9               E-Mail Handling

All e-mail sent and received can be automatically linked to a Company and/or Contact and copied to the MX-Contact (Public) E-Mail Folder. Thus all (relevant, and non-confidential) incoming and outgoing e-mail correspondence can be made visible to the organisation as a whole.