How do you deal with people who is involved in two or more companies? I’m working with a lot of small companies and this situation is pretty common for me. It’s pretty nice to have this company notes with all it’s involved persons to the right.

Another area where one person to many companies relationships would be useful is when you’re dealing with people who volunteer with non-profit organizations, but of course they also have regular jobs.

This becomes more important/valuable when they are Board Members or in other high level positions AND it is the non-profit that is your client.

Example: My client is Meals on Wheels, and Jim Smith is Chairman of the Board. Jim Smith is also VP of Finance at Wachovia Bank. Being able to link him to both companies with both titles would be very useful.

I agree. I have many contacts for our small business that are writers, artists, musicians, record label owners, and have day jobs; those day jobs are often as important as their other skills, eg- a friend who is a dj, recordlabel owner, and works at an art school that hosts many events that are of interest to us. Tags are helpful in listing all the hats they wear, but they have different titles and businesses, as well as different contact info for their positions.

We’re listening. Thanks for the feedback.

I wonder if being able to ‘own’ your ‘card’ ala plaxo would be a useful feature… that way I can update my details (after verifying via email of course) and all my contacts would receive the update automatically. Sounds more ‘web 2.0’ to me.

+1

I am involved in several companies, but the contacts are different for each. We have multiple Highrise accounts setup, one for each major company. It works well, and although I might have a contact in two Highrise accounts, the notes and actions for each are different, so it keeps them separate.

please let us associate one person to more companies (almost 60% of our contacts will have at least 2 organizations they’re part of, personally I’m part of 4)

The ability to associate a person to more than one company is, imho, the single biggest drawback that Highrise has right now. I’d do a cartwheel in my home office if you added this feature (it’s a small office…a cartwheel would be a real feat!).

Thanks for the wonderful product.

Would not tags help group people into multiple groups ? As the tag can contain the sole company associated with that company, you would see that company and all the people associated with it

yep, i’d also be a considerable supporter of each person potentially belonging to multiple companies. in response to richard (above), tags are probably ok if you have small number of multi-company people but it’s a clumsy workaround for HR users with many multi-company contacts.

+1

We have the EXACT same issue as bussetech.

I was kind of surprised when I didn’t find this feature. I think HR is a great product, but I would really like this for the reasons already listed above.

+1 for a resolution to bussetech’s issue

Hi guys,

A person should take a decision after discussing with more and more people. Don’t chase anybody, try to listen everybody, but never make a decision.

+1

This would be nice to have, but since reasons to contact people would be different I hope if implemented that it would include considerations like these:
1) contact record would show:

...Name

...position @ company #1

...position @ company #2

2) which companies contact info is the one I should use mainly (and something to auto-magically help us see when NOT to call someone’s cell #, or not to send to emails to work address, etc.)
3) consideration on how this affects printing out (or, PDFing) lists of contacts (ex. can I just get a list of phone#’s)
4) obviously, phone#’s, addresses, emails, etc for each company
5) ability to add the other companies a person is at [which is there currently] but also the ability to NOT add that company as anything more than a marker of information [that it, if I learn someone works at Merril Lynch, and they help my org via his own non-profit but Merrill Lynch is NOT involved, I don’t want to accidentally select his work company for actions in HR and definitely don’t want to send emails to his work email address…

On the occasions we had had this situation we would tag the contact with the minor company. Most of the time we would duplicate the guy if his or her functions are independent. Had we run into a high level one in our sales process, we would just open up a case for him :)

I guess this feature would just complicate things up, much to 37s dismay – especially auto filing of emails: if a contact has 1 email address but more than one company, how does HR decide what company to show their emails in?

This is the best solution I can think of:

Just create a new contact for each company one person works at, and to make them distinguishable in a quick search, enter each company name after the surname in brackets: John Smith (Company One), John Smith (Another Company), John Smith (Company Trois).

Put notes about them into the contact that corresponds to the company the note is about. If you wanted to see all notes on this person, across companies, you could create a case that includes all notes from each of their contacts.

+1 please
Company should offer “add another” just like phones, IMs, and emails. I am using Highrise to keep track of my contacts in many social organizations, and like bussetech noted, many of those folks have lots of overlap. I’d like to be able to click on a company (well, “organization” in my case) and see all the folks in it, even if the same person is in several of them. Tagging is a clumsy (but necessary in the meantime) hack to workaround it.

Is this going to happen, or does this have the possiblity of happening?

Im looking for highrise to replace salesforce.com, and this is the last thing I need. I’d be willing to pay to make this happen!!

Its driving me crazy, because most of my contacts belong to multiple organizations. I’m in the early stage private equity space working with Angel investors and VC’s. Many VC’s belong to angel groups, so they have multiple rolls, and highrise is falling short on this front. Everything else works great, but when I look at a contact, if i can’t see that he belongs to multiple companies then I have a major problem!

thanks

Doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. Ryan said they’re listening well over a year ago…

+1 for me, again business contacts who are active in the community and work for different voluntary bodies.

Ideally, yes, a contact should have multiple companies listed, but as a compromise I would settle for an ‘alter-ego’ link. Deliberately duplicate the contact under each company and have HR ask me if this is an alter-ego for someone already in the system with the same name. Then simply display the alter-ego(s) whenever a contact is shown.

I agree that email may be a problem if the person only has one email address. I would want HR to duplicate the email to each matching contact as I can always clean up later. This is easier than remembering to cut and paste sent email into notes.

Wikipedia: An alter ego (Latin, “the other I”) is a second self, a second personality or persona within a person.

Maybe it’s just me, but when a person belongs to two different companies that person’s notes/files/contact info and often tags are very different. Having one person have multiple companies would also add another field to nearly everything. Tasks would need a which company (well maybe not tasks), Notes would definitely need another field and so would contact info. I personally just add another person with a different title and company. It works rather well. So if John Doe works at two companies and I search for John Doe, I just look for the one in the right company. Something like Snapey suggested might help clean things up a bit, but having one person with multiple companies would add a lot of clutter I think.

EDIT: Not to mention there would have to be a way to sort notes posted about that person in a specific company.

I keep visiting Highrise’ site periodically, looking wishfully at this product, and have been since it was first rolled out. Many of us keep lurking/visiting, but not writing comments because we don’t feel we get a serious hearing on this topic.

Until we can associate contacts with multiple companies, without adding yet another layer such as cases, we can’t consider Highrise seriously for our business. So the question is, will Highrise ever do this, or should we just give up and start evaluating competitive offerings again/instead?

There aren’t any other obstacles to our adoption of Highrise; this is a complete show-stopper for us.

I understand not discussing feature timeframes until they’re more real, but maybe you could give us a hint on direction?