Creating a Centralized Contact System

Creating a Centralized Contact System

Managing customer contact information throughout a company can be a daunting task, especially at large companies where each department might have its own contact system. In addition, employees might have their own private contact databases, separate from their department s contact database. Department and employee databases often will be inconsistent, and they probably will not contain any of the customers privacy preferences.

So what happens when a customer demands that your company stop sending him e-mail messages or when he wants to update his contact information? How do you manage this information across multiple databases? Centralizing your contact system is the only way your company can respond to these requests in a practical manner.

By creating a single contact database, your company can be more effective in executing its marketing campaigns and more responsive to a customer s privacy needs. Some software companies, Microsoft included, sell contact solutions that enable the centralized storage of customers contact information and privacy preferences. Your company can also build its own contact system. The remainder of this section examines how to implement a solution by using Microsoft Windows 2000 Active Directory directory service or by using a database.

Using Active Directory to Build a Contact System

In many enterprises, Active Directory is used to manage the corporate network and its resources. Contacts are one of the resources (objects) that Active Directory can manage. These contacts can be used to manage your customer contact list. The built-in security of Active Directory will permit you to restrict access to only those employees who have a relationship with your customers.

The only thing missing from Active Directory is the ability to track a user s privacy preferences. Fortunately, the schema for Active Directory can be easily extended to add attributes to accommodate these preference values.

For more information on Active Directory, see Chapter 4, Securing Active Directory Objects and Attributes of this book. For information on extending the Active Directory schema, visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/netdir/ad/extending_the_schema.asp.

Figure 30-1 shows an example of an implementation using Active Directory in a small company. In this example, all the customer contact information is stored in Active Directory, and the schema has been extended to permit the storage of privacy preferences. The privacy flags represent the extended data that is added to the directory.

figure 30-1 a small company s customer contact database

Figure 30-1. A small company s customer contact database

Larger companies might have multiple groups that store the same contact information about a customer in their local database, along with customer information specific to their group. Figure 30-2 provides an example of this. In this example, a user s e-mail address is used to correlate the data in Active Directory with the data in the particular local database.

figure 30-2 a larger company s customer contact database

Figure 30-2. A larger company s customer contact database

Using a Database to Build a Contact System

Many companies use databases to store contact information. A database can be used to store contact information and user privacy preferences in the same way Active Directory is used to accomplish these tasks. Be sure to place adequate protections on each table, not only to prevent unauthorized access, but also to isolate access to the group s data to group administrators.

A small company might store its customers contact and privacy information in a single table. In the following example, the user information and privacy preferences are stored in the same database table:

E-mail

Name

Address

email_ok

mail_ok

phone_ok

marketing_ok

joe@microsoft.com

Joe

101 Main Street

Y

Y

Y

N

If your company has multiple groups that store information about the same customer, you might want to store customers personal data in one table and their privacy preferences in another table. This will permit customers to specify explicit privacy settings for each group within your company storing personal information about them. The tables that follow show an example this. These two tables use an assigned ID as the common key that connects them:

ID

E-mail

Name

Address

123

joe@microsoft.com

Joe Worden

101 Main Street

ID

Department

email_ok

mail_ok

phone_ok

marketing_ok

123

Marketing

Y

Y

Y

Y

123

Sales

Y

Y

N

N



Microsoft Windows Security Resource Kit
Microsoft Windows Security Resource Kit
ISBN: 0735621748
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 189

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