Auto-creating External Contacts

It's now possible to set the system to automatically create a new external Contact record when incoming emails arrive which contain new email addresses.

The new setting to allow this is found in Builder's General Settings section, and is set to ON by default, i.e. to enable automatic creation of contacts from emails.

Note that when such a new contact record is auto-created, the company it gets linked to will depend on the contact scope setting in place: If it's set to 'Global', or 'Global and Local', the auto-created contact will have a Global scope, i.e. not linked to any specific company. If it is set to 'Local', the auto-created contact will be created under the company that the related Work item exists under.

The system will auto-populate the first name and last name of the contact based on the email display name. More specifics on this:

• If there is a space in the email display name, anything before the first space will be used as the contact's first name and anything after the last space will be used as their last name. For example, if the email display name is 'John Smith' then the contact's first name will be auto-filled as 'John' and their last name will be auto-filled as 'Smith'.

• If there is a comma in the email display name, anything before the first comma will be used as the contact's last name and anything after the comma but before the space will be used as their first name. For example, if the email display name is 'Smith, John' then the contact's last name will be auto-filled as 'Smith' and their first name will be auto-filled as 'John'.

• If the system can't auto-fill the first name and last name with confidence, then the contact will be auto-created without a first and last name and the user will be prompted to fill this themselves when they submit the work item.

Additionally, a new standard column has been added to the Contact Management Page called 'Auto-Created' that lets users see which of their external contacts have been created automatically, and which have been created manually.

Please note that once a contact that has been auto-created has had edits made to it, it will no longer display as an auto-created contact in the 'Auto Created' column of the Contact Management Page.