Donor Manager Software

Hi John,

As I've been working in the program recently a number of things have occurred to me.

One is that I have an address organizer program that allows me to click a button to send an email or to access a web address, like DM, though it doesn't have the very nice DM 'Map' button. But it does have a 'Call' button next to the phone field, which I use constantly.

They use the built-in Windows dialer for this function. Would it be easy enough to add this to DM? Such a feature would neatly round off all the helpful contact facilities in that window!

-- Steve.

Steve,

Another good suggestion.

Let me check and see how hard this would be (probably not too hard).

The challenge would be the dialing prefixes, etc. (how do I know if I need to dial the prefixes for trunk calls, etc.)

I'll see what I come up with.

John

In the program I have that uses this feature, it simply dials whatever you enter in the phone field. I mean, it would be great if the program automatically detected that this was a South African address and prefixed the appropriate international and country code... but I feel some of the work could be left to the user! With my other program, if we happened to be staying in the Netherlands and I was hooked up to a modem, I would temporarily delete the international and country codes from Dutch numbers before dialing them. I.e., I would enter all necessary prefixes for every number that is not local to where I normally live. Maybe this would be a problem for folk who move around a lot...?

Be great if you can include this, though. Thanks for your flexibility!

-- Steve.

Steve,

You are right with the issues. If I do this, probably what I'll do is pop up a dialog box that shows you the number it intends to dial. Then the user can put in any prefix he may need, then away it goes.

The prefix that you put in will be separate and the program will remember it from call to call and session to session until you change it.

We'll see how that goes.

See you later.

When you say "the program will remember it from call to call and session to session", do you mean that it will remember the prefix for each specific number? I.e., it will know that the number 218984 in the entry for J. Smith always has the prefix 01844?? That would be great!

-- Steve

Well, that's not exactly what I was thinking, but I could do that.

But ... if the number ALWAYS has the same prefix, then why not put it into the phone number itself ?

OK, now I see what you mean. You said "The prefix that you put in will be separate," and I thought you were implying that in the phone field you'd only enter the basic number with NO prefixes. But, yes, if the prefix is always the same it would be easiest to have that in the phone field. So normally you wouldn't have to add anything when you dial. But if you happened to be in a different area, you'd still be given the opportunity to add or change the prefix. That sounds very flexible.

Thanks again for considering all these things!

-- Steve

Well, you would want to put in the number all of the elements that never change.

Then when dialing, the dialer would give you the option to add a prefix to the dialing for that situation.

We'll see what I come up with. My priority now is getting the WBT UK gift import working, the giving detail tracking debugged, and the personalized email engine going.