One Contact - multiple accounts ?

[bradcook]

Hi all,

Wondering if anyone has run into the situation of one person (contact) that needs to belong to more than one account, without having to maintain multiple contact records.

For example, we may have to deal with a single person who relates to 3 accounts :

- owner of XYZ Ltd
- is on the board of ABC group
- is chairman of 123 Committee

Each account is independent of the other, and the person has distinct roles (and communications from us) depending on what "hat" he's wearing on a given day, but his primary contact details (at XYZ Ltd) remain the same.

Ideally we'd like to be able to create a single contact, but relate him to more than one account.

Anyone seen/done this ?

Any & all suggestions welcome ! (be nice )

Regards,
Brad

[lougaou]

Hi,

We have developp excatly what you are looking for.
We call it Syno-UbiGroup.

This module will be available on SugarExchange asap..this week if everything is ok.

Lougaou
www.synolia.com

[malcolmh]

Hi,

At the Account level you can assign a contact to several Acounts. I don't think however that you can give the Contact different roles as you are looking for above.

[Angel]

An add-on to Malcolm's comments...

There is a bug in the current release where linking a contact to more than one account causes all instances of that contact to be deleted if you happen to delete any of them. Also, if you export the contacts, you'll get one entry per link, thus you might end up with three instances of John Smith, although there is actually only one instance within the database.

[bradcook]

Hi again,

Thanks Malcolm & Angel - that's something I'll play with, and if export time is the only time I see duplication, then we can maybe live with that. Nasty deletion bug though, so yes I'll be cautious.

Lougaou, I'll definitely be watching SugarExchange !

Appreciate your feedback guys. Thanks heaps !

Brad

[Angel]

Hi again,

Thanks Malcolm & Angel - that's something I'll play with, and if export time is the only time I see duplication, then we can maybe live with that. Nasty deletion bug though, so yes I'll be cautious.

Lougaou, I'll definitely be watching SugarExchange !

Appreciate your feedback guys. Thanks heaps !

Brad

Yes, it is a bit ugly, but as a side note, Sugar performs soft deletes and the records one did not intend to delete are actually still witihin the database, only marked as "deleted." One can still retrieve them through the backend.

[foreshore]

Has the bug with deleting contacts been fixed?

Is there a concept of a "master" account, or is the contact just linked to all accounts?

When linking a contact to multiple accounts and viewing the account, I don't see a list of accounts in the subpanels - why's that?

Derek...

[Angel]

Has the bug with deleting contacts been fixed?

Doesn't look like it, unless I overlooked it in the latest release notes.

Is there a concept of a "master" account, or is the contact just linked to all accounts?

Sort of. You could use the Member Organizations functionality to establish a relationship between different accounts, but depending on your needs, it might or might not be a bit limited in functionality.

When linking a contact to multiple accounts and viewing the account, I don't see a list of accounts in the subpanels - why's that?

Does the account name show up when you view the contacts in the ListView mode?

[lougaou]

Hi,

You can test our module called UbiGroup
Go to our demo site

http://sugarmod.crm-france.com
User ubigroup
Password ubigroup

If you want more info please feel free to contact Synolia at sugar@synolia.com

[aatamer]

The bug is not really a bug, it's just the way the contacts-accounts relationship is designed. In the database contacts to accounts is a one-to-many design, but in the front end it appears to be one-to-one. By deleting the contact, all account relationships are automatically deleted to prevent orphan records in the database. As a bare minimum, they can put an "Are you sure you want to delete the contact and all its relationships?" prompt before someone deletes it.

To get the accounts panel to show up, you need to edit the file layout_defs.php in <webfolder>\sugarcrm\modules\Contacts with an entry

'accounts' => array(
'order' => 45,
'module' => 'Accounts',
'subpanel_name' => 'default',
'get_subpanel_data' => 'accounts',
'add_subpanel_data' => 'account_id',
'title_key' => 'LBL_ACCOUNTS_SUBPANEL_TITLE',
'top_buttons' => array(
array('widget_class' => 'SubPanelTopCreateButton'),
array('widget_class' => 'SubPanelTopSelectButton', 'mode'=>'MultiSelect')
),
),

We might have to implement "primary account" capability as was suggested above.