What are User Contact Lists?

As discussed in the InterAction Fundamental Concepts guide, InterAction lets each user maintain his or her own list of contacts. At the same time, InterAction manages all the organization’s collective knowledge about contacts that comes from the various other systems and users.

InterAction provides a firm list of contacts, while each user also has his or her own list of contacts. The firm list contains a single version of each contact. The same contact, however, may be in multiple user lists. Contacts in the firm list are called “firm contacts.” Contacts in a user’s list are called “user contacts.”

Users can manage their user contact list directly in the InterAction Web Client. Alternatively, they can manage their contacts in Microsoft Outlook. InterAction synchronizes contacts in each user’s Outlook with the contacts in the user’s InterAction contact list. You cannot access user contact lists from the Windows Client.

Although professionals maintain their own lists of contacts, they want to leverage their organization’s information for certain contacts. To facilitate this communication of information between the user lists and the firm list, InterAction lets users “connect” any of their user contacts with the single version of the contact in the firm list.

A user contact list is automatically created when you create an InterAction user account.

Note: When a user connects a user contact to a firm contact, InterAction provides the ability for the user to receive changes from the firm contact and apply them to the user contact. Similarly, connecting a user contact to a firm contact lets the user contribute information about the contact to the firm list.

Who Can Access User Contact Lists?

Each user contact list can only be accessed by the user the list belongs to and that user’s proxies. For example, Ed Roberts is the only person who can access Ed Roberts’s user contact list. If Ed’s secretary is set as his proxy, then both Ed and his secretary have access to his user contact list. For more information about proxies, see Managing User Proxies.

Note: Proxies cannot view contacts a user has specified as ‘Private.’

The InterAction system administrator account (IAADMIN) cannot access user contacts lists, nor can any data stewards. The only way to give another user access to a user’s contact list is to make that user a proxy for the person.