Logging Correspondence in UR

[danson]

Hi,

I'm on the first day of my trial of UR.

I am coming from a Time&Chaos background and have been looking for something a bit more powerful and flexible. UR looks very good so far.

I have one major requirement: To log correspondence.

Are there any tried and tested, established methods of doing this within UR?

I need to be able to link a correspondence chain both with a particular contact and within an organisation. Each piece should be logged with date as well as type (email,phone) and notes.

The correspondence should show in chronological order. There should be a way to summarise all individual correspondence objects into a single view text output summary.

If I have multiple contacts within that organisation there should be a view available that shows all correspondents with all contacts in that organisation interleaved in chronological order.

Lastly - each correspondence log should have a 'follow-up' facility to link in with the calander / to-do list (I guess this would be just a child logical link into that calendar/list)

Has someone developed a way to achieve the above which they wouldn't mind sharing with me? If this can be done it would fill a large gap in my requirements that T&C currently doesn't (currently storing all correspondence in a pure text file that just logs each entry on a new line).

Many thanks!
Daniel

[xja]

Not exactly what you are looking for and unfortunately not automated but what I have done to deal with email correspondence is... I created a new Template item called "Mail Thread", setup its Child Items pane to include Item Title, From and Message Date, sorted by Message Date. Then when I have an email conversation that I want to keep track of, I create a new Mail Thread item, name it according to the subject of the conversation, and then paste all Outlook mail items for that conversation into it (ie, the mail items are children of the Mail Thread item). When you select the Mail Thread item, they appear in the Child Items pane in chrono order. You can add notes about the conversation to the Mail Thread item (in Item Details or as a Text child). You can link related Contacts, web pages, documents, etc. to the Mail Thread item.

In your case, you might create a template called "Correspondence," add Date Created to the Child Items pane, sort by it, and then maybe create other templates called "Phone Call" and "Mail Thread" (eg, as defined above) that you can use as children to the Correspondence template.

Unfortunately, you need to manually create and link the hierarchy of items each time you have correspondence. It would be really cool if you could, for instance, select a list of emails of the same thread and then paste into UR such that it automatically creates a Mail Thread item with the emails as children and automatically links the Contact items for the correspondents into the Mail Thread. Or to select a Contact and click "Log phone call" command and have it create a new Phone Call item with the Contact linked to it.

You could use something like MacroMaker to try to automate this. I did that so that I can select an email in Outlook, hit a shortcut key combination and the macro copies the email, switches to UR, creates a Task, and then pastes/links the email to the Task.