Projects come, projects go

J

Jammer Six

I'm a general contractor, and I live and die by projects.

The new Project Center in Entourage is demonstrating the potential to
change my life for the better, so I'm very interested in making it do
everything for me that it is capable of.

I had, in fact, already established something very similar by hand,
(all documents, spreadsheets, contracts in Word, sales presentations in
one folder, email routed to separate folders by rules, tasks sorted by
project, etc.) which is quite time consuming to maintain.

So far, this is the first issue I may have a problem with: projects end.

All projects end, but customers continue to exist.

Many of my customers are repeat customers, and when they send me email
past the end of a project, I want the email to go somewhere besides the
project in the project center. That is, I want the project to continue
to exist as an archive of what was said and done, including a record of
the contacts, but I want the new business to go to a new project.

Furthermore, one customer will (hopefully) be associated with several
different projects, and I want email from that customer to go to the
correct project, (the current project) and not get sprayed across all
past projects. However, I would also like to associate that customer
with past projects, so I can keep a list of who was associated with
which project.

Are there ways to accomplish all this, or can one contact only be
associated with one project at a time?
 
J

Jammer Six

€ I'm a general contractor, and I live and die by projects.

The other thing I'd like to accomplish is to keep a copy of a completed
project, but have the project "go away", and leave the list of
projects.

Is this possible?
 
D

Dave Cortright

Are there ways to accomplish all this, or can one contact only be
associated with one project at a time?

You can accomplish pretty much all of this in the project center. Any item
including contacts can be associated with any number of projects. When you
are done with a project, you can archive it and one of the archive options
is to delete items from Entourage. If you choose to do this, you can also
choose to not delete items associated with other projects. If you want to be
sure no contact ever gets deleted during archive, create a dummy "Don't
Delete" project and assign all contacts to it.
 
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