Understanding Communication Management

Communication management enables you to track and analyze all of your institution's contacts with students, staff, constituents, and organizations inside and outside the institution. You can track:

• All incoming and outgoing communications.

• All types of communication—letters, email, phone calls, personal contact, facsimiles, and so on.

• Communications generated by other offices that affect your office.

• All staff involved with a communication.

You can also assign communications to individuals, organizations, and groups of people.

To assign a communication, you must select the method, category, context, direction, and letter code for that communication to identify basic information about the communication, such as the who, what, when, and how of each communication, which correlate in this way:

• Method = How

• Context = What

• Category = Why

• Direction = Where

• Date = When

• ID = Who

Use the communication management pages to manually assign communications to individuals or organizations. You can access the communication management pages as described here, or you can access them by clicking the Communication button on pages throughout the system.

You can assign communications to individuals and organizations manually, or you can use the 3C engine to automatically assign communications to individuals or organizations based on rules and conditions that you define.

See Defining 3C Engine Triggers.

You can indicate whether the communication is a phone conversation, a letter, or an in-person meeting with the individual. If the communication is an outgoing softcopy document, you can, with either Letter Generation or Communication Generation, manage the variable data and enclosures to include, and enter comments that you can choose to print or not print in the output. With Communication Generation, you can also manage variable data, attachments to include, and comments to include or exclude in an outgoing email. With Communication Generation, you can also send an outgoing communication based on the student's preferred method of either letter or email, and send it in any language supported by your institution that is set at the student's preferred language.

In addition to creating communications for individuals, you can create communications for organizations. For example, you can send letters to schools announcing that an admissions counselor from your institution will be in their area on a certain date, or you can send bills to companies with which your institution does business.

When you assign a communication, you must identify the data to extract about the recipients and select the code from the Standard Letters table to identify the template to use. For Letter Generation, you use your institution's word processing software to merge the data into a template created with that software and associated with the letter code, or into one of the sample Microsoft Word templates that the PeopleSoft application delivers. For Communication Generation, you identify the data source from which to extract data, associate it with the XML report definition, and associate the report with the standard letter code.

Use the inquiry pages to review communication information for an individual or an organization. You can enter criteria and search for a summary of communications or view details of the communication assignments. You can search for a summary of communications to determine if a specific communication was sent, if it included enclosures, or if it was a joint communication.

See Selecting the Type of 3C Group Access.

This procedure provides a high-level overview of the managing communications processes and the order in which they must be performed. Steps 1 through 5 are described in Setting Up Communications.

To generate and manage communications:

1. Set up codes for the standard letters that your institution wants to use.

   Each letter requires an administrative function.

2. Set up communication contexts.

   Contexts include methods, directions, and letter codes.

3. Set up communication categories.

   Categories are sets of communication contexts.

4. Set up communication 3C groups.

   3C groups are required for assigning security access for communications.

5. (Optional) Set up communication speed keys (Comm Keys).

   Comm Keys enable you to associate communication elements together and access them as a set, using the assigned shortcut code.

6. Assign communications to individuals or organizations.

   You can assign communications manually or you can use the 3C engine to assign communications automatically in real time or in the background.

7. Review communications assigned to individuals or organizations.

   You can review the details of each communication. You can view a list of all communications assigned to them. You can also review the security access that users have for viewing or updating the communications.

8. Generate the communications.

   You can use either the Letter Generation process to generate letters or the Communication Generation process to generate letters and emails. The Letter Generation process extracts data that you can then, using your word processing software, merge into letter templates. The Communication Generation process extracts only the data specified in the source file and merges it immediately into the associated Oracle BI Publisher templates for letters or emails. For emails, the process also sends the generated outputs to the extracted email addresses.

9. Review the data that was extracted for each of the IDs processed.