Contacts can be referenced in your KPI data, allowing you to quickly determine who to contact regarding a specific set of data. Use Visual KPI Designer to configure contacts.
Once you’ve created and saved a contact, it becomes available in the Contact pull-down lists within the Groups, KPIs, Charts and Tables worksheets in Visual KPI Designer.
Open the Configure Contacts worksheet.
Click the Sitewide Settings configuration icon () and select Contacts & Alerts/Contacts.
The Configure Contacts worksheet is added to the workbook. If it already exists in the workbook, the Configure Contacts configuration worksheet is activated and the current configuration data is retrieved from the database and displayed.
Contacts Configuration Toolbar
When you select one of the Site Settings menu options, a worksheet opens with the related configuration data. For each worksheet, icons appear in the toolbar that affect only the data related to the selected worksheet.
Adding a New Contact
- To add a Contact definition, on the first blank row below the column headers, enter a Name for the contact. This is the text that is displayed in the Contact pull-down lists for Groups, KPIs, Charts and Tables.
- Enter a Description for your contact, if appropriate.
- In the Contact Name column, enter the name of the contact(s) or the tag name that holds the contact name information. If you are using a tag name, select the appropriate interface name in the Contact Interfacecolumn. You can enter multiple contact names, just separate them with semicolons. Example: Lou Gnu;Sue Gnu
- In the Contact Email column, enter the e-mail address(es) or the tag name that holds the e-mail address information. If you are using a tag name, select the appropriate interface name in the Contact Email Interface column. You can enter multiple e-mail addresses, just separate them with semicolons. Example: lougnu@transpara.com;suegnu@transpara.com
- In the Contact Phone column, enter the phone number(s) or tag name that holds the contact’s phone number information. If you are using a tag name, select the appropriate interface name in the Contact Phone Interface column. You can enter multiple phone numbers, just separate them with semicolons. Example: (602) 555-0413;(623) 555-9859
- Place an “x” in the (x) column for the new Contact.
- Click the Save button to write the changes to the database.
Contact Membership
When you click the Membership Of Selected Contacts button, a new worksheet (Contact Membership) is added to the workbook. For each marked Contact that is referenced by another KPI data object, a row is added to the worksheet. The row includes the Contact Name and Contact Description, the owning object type in the Parent Type column, along with the Parent Name and Parent Description. If a contact is a member of more than one KPI Data object, then additional rows are added below the first instance of the Contact.
Editing a Contact
You can modify existing Contact definitions by overwriting any piece of the Contact’s definition data (with the exception of the Contact ID) directly in the cells in the Contacts worksheet. You can also copy an existing Contact row and paste it into a new row. Be sure to remove the pasted Contact’s ID before you save it.
In order to save your changes, place an “x” in the (x) column for each Contact you want to save, then click the Save Selected Contacts button. All Contacts marked with and “x” will be saved to the Visual KPI Server.
Deleting a Contact
You can delete any Contact included in the Contracts worksheet. In order to delete a Contact, place an”x” in the (x) column for each Contact you want to delete, then click the Delete Selected Contacts button. All Contacts marked with an”x” will be deleted from the Visual KPI Server.
NOTE: You may want to save a copy of the VisualKPIDesigner.xlsx file prior to deleting your Contact data. If you later realize that you did not want to delete this data, you can open the copy of the VisualKPIDesigner.xlsx file and then re-save your data.