Contact and company are two of the most important object types in the Inova Classic application. Each provides an overview of past and ongoing interactions between your company and another organization or individual person, serving as a hub of related information and linking multiple opportunities and business relationships. 

Contacts let you store and maintain contact information for clients, subject matter experts, potential business partners, and others. You can associate contacts with almost all other types of business objects in the system, including projects, agreements, and companies.

When you open an object such as a project or agreement, the linked contacts are listed in the Contacts tab. 

Contacts can also be added to Contact Groups which can be included in reviews and authorization decisions. 

Contact Overview

A contact record in Inova Classic has two main sections:

1. The Overview tab, containing basic details about the contact including the category, type, and role.
2. Tabs that list all the key interactions your company has with a contact--for example, any in-licensing deals where that contact has some association with the transaction--as well as any supporting activities or communications.

Depending upon the modules you are using and/or have access to, you may see more or fewer tabs than what is displayed in the screenshot. If you are not seeing a tab you believe you should have access to, check Page Settings or talk to your Inova Classic application administrator.

Contacts in the application can be one of three types:

• Application User - the person can log into the application itself. When a new user is added to the application by the Administator, a contact record with this type is automatically created.
• Internal - the person is not a user, but is a contact internal to your company. He is able to participate in reviews and receive alerts and reminders from the application.
• External - the person is not a user and is not within your company, though he may be affiliated with a partner company or a member of your network of experts. He is able to participate in reviews and receive alerts and reminders from the application.

Contacts can be created in several ways:

• Manually, from the New Contact form
• From a modal window, while creating an associated object such as a project or asset
• While pushing an email into the application--see Contact Push
• Automatically, when a new user is added to the system, as described above
• While creating a review, to be added to the review as a participant

Create a contact manually

1. On the Contacts list, click New Contact. The system will display the new contact form:

   

2. Populate the required fields. Don't forget to set the correct Type!
3. Click Save.

Create a contact from a modal window

The modal window (sometimes called "quick create") lets you create a new contact on the fly while creating another object.

1. Access this option by clicking the plus button, as shown here:

   

   When you click the plus button, the modal window is displayed:

   

2. Populate the required fields. 

3. Click Save in the modal window. The screen will refresh and display your new contact in blue, as shown below:

   

4. After entering the rest of the data in the linked object, click Save.

To save your new contact record, you must save the linked object as well.

Note that on some forms such as the Choose Participants page of a review, clicking the plus button will not display the modal window, but will instead display a New Contact form. 

Follow the same steps to create and save the new contact.

Create a contact via email push

The Outlook Add-in includes a feature to create new contacts in Inova Classic while an email is being pushed in to the application. For details about this feature, see Contact Push.