The data quality features can quickly make significant changes to InterAction data across all of your environment. Because of this, you should maintain records of who made changes, when the changes were made, and what the changes were. To help you do this, you can use the following features:
Ways to Monitor Changes Made by Data Quality Features
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| Printing Details |
When you perform most of the data quality features, you can print important information for research purposes and for maintaining a record. You can do the following: • Multi-Contact Duplicate Merge - print a list of the contacts that will be merged • Find and Replace - print a list of the contacts and the data that will be updated • Change Person to Company - print a list of any warnings that alert you to data that may require additional cleanup. • Merge Addresses and Phones - print a list of the contacts that will be updated to share the address kept • Transfer Phones and Addresses from Company to Person - print the list of contacts to which the phone or address is moved • Replace Unknown Countries - print the list of contacts with addresses containing an unknown country value |
| Reviewing the Audit Trail | If data is sourced in a folder that is audited, any changes made to the data through the data quality features is recorded in the audit trail. This lets you maintain a record of the history of a specific contact’s data and the changes made by the data quality features. For more information, see Using the Audit Trail. |
| Reviewing the Log Files | The best way to maintain information about the actions completed by the data quality features is to regularly review the log files. All features available from the Data Quality menu record information to the log files. For more information about the log files, see Using the Data Quality Log Files. |
| Finding Retained Data Activities |
Retained data activities are used to maintain a record of data that is removed from a contact during a cleanup procedure. For example, when using the Change Person to Company feature, contact data may be lost from the contact. For example, the Job Title field is only applicable to Person contacts. If any information is entered in the Job Title field, this information will be lost. The Retained Data Activity, however, records this information so it is not completely deleted from the contact. For more information about the change person to company feature, see "Converting a Person Contact to a Company Contact" on page 1. By default, the activity type for retained data activities is system, however using a custom activity type, such as “Data Quality Activity” is usually better. This makes it very easy to find the retained data activities. In addition, the activity type should be inactive. This prevents end users from accidentally creating an activity of the same type. |
Setting the Retained Data Activity Type
- Log on to InterAction Administrator.
- If necessary, create the new activity type to use first. For details, see the Configuring InterAction guide.
- Double-click Configuration in the entity list.
- Select the Data Quality tab and choose the activity type for Data Quality.
- Choose OK.