[sims] SIMS Roles - Contact

[Pyroman]

How can I make a SIMS user a "contact" so they appear in the communications log as a communicatee that can be selected?

 

Cheers

[PhilNeal]

Contacts are automatically defined when you link a person to a pupil.

[Pyroman]

Can you do it manually? Some of our staff come up in the communicatee section and others don't and I can't work out the difference why that would be! We want to add staff so they can be used as the communicatee for outgoing phonecalls Edited January 7, 2016 by Pyroman

[PhilNeal]

Staff with roles should appear i.e. Head of Year.

Recommend you log a case and speak to someone.

[bobsmith]

I've just had a play with this - never used it that way before.

 

Can you give a worked example of a situation where this would happen?

[Pyroman]

I've sussed it! There's a button for Contacts at the top, you then create a New contact and do a search for the existing staff member it will then add it as a role to that staff member. @bobsmith If you wanted to Log calls home and which staff member made the call you can do that in the communication log. It just needed the Staff members having "contact" as a role in SIMS for them to be the Communicatee in the communication Log.

[bobsmith]

Ah ha, that makes sense, except I would have expected SIMS to automatically have all staff available in that list without having to add an extra role to them!

[PhilNeal]

There is an option to add staff via role.

[bobsmith]

Hi @PhilNeal, where is that screen?

 

My contacts button has surname, forenames, postcode as search items.

 

My communicatee log (through the communication log link on student records) has contact/bill payer/enquirer

[PhilNeal]

This screen comes from the "InTouch General Message" area.

[vikpaw]

Maybe some of your staff are linked to pupils as contacts - either parents or emergency contacts?

That's how it usually happens.

 

I wouldn't add them as contacts manually, this can be problematic.

 

We found there were some screens where the data validation wouldn't work, because staff records have extra data attached which contacts don't, so when you then go to view / edit in one or the other areas, you can't leave the page because it can't handle the data. Or it's expecting different data.

 

We made sure that all staff parents were added a second time with a separate contact role. It's a pain to manage, but kept things working.

 

It might be okay, if you're just adding the role, with not other data, but be wary. It would be better to be able to reference them as Staff, which you can do with Phil's method...?