About events

Events are stored within your Pearl database and can be used for a number of things. Events can be:

1. Tasks and Jobs set for you or another staff member (Personal events)
2. Events that your company runs such as training days (Public events)
3. Calls to or from your staff members
4. Meetings
5. Helpdesk tickets

These can be shown in list form as well as on your calendar.

If you are using the Pearl Project Manager module, then you can also assign the event to a project. An event for a project is also called a “job”.

Event Team

Every event must have a manager (owner); this person will be able to edit the event information and add other people to the event.

You can assign people to an event either as extra administrators or as users. Users, for example, would be the people signed up for a training event, and have read-only permissions on the event.

Pearl can automatically email or SMS the event team members when the event changes, depending on the event settings.

Event Groups

Events must be created in a calendar (also called an event group). Each different calendar or event group can be given a unique colour. To edit your event groups click Setup->Event Groups from the main menu.

Event groups should be given a visibility level; this is the scope of viewers that are allowed to see the event. Events with visibility set to “public” will also be shown on your website calendar.

Creating an Event

There are a number of ways to create events:

To create a “call” event

(for example a reminder to call a customer):
Find the contact, hover over the “menu” link on the right of the screen and click “schedule call”, or from within the contact edit screen there is a link to schedule a call in the “more info” tab.

To create a task (to-do item)

For yourself or another staff member:
Click Home->New Event from the main menu. This will open a new window allowing you to create the task. Alternatively you can hover over the “menu” link for a contact in the CRM screen and click “create task”.

To create any other type of event:

Click Home->New event from the main menu … or …
Click the “+” icon when in the calendar view or day list view

There are also links from within the Project management and Helpdesk modules that allow you to create events.

Editing an Event

Use one of the following methods to edit an event:

1. Find the event in the calendar and click the event title to edit it
2. Show a list of events from the Home->My tasks & events menu item
3. Search for the event by name or event ID using the events quick search box.

Event Information

When editing or creating an event, you can enter a brief description of the event. More lengthy event information can be provided on an external website, or on one of your own website pages. If you want to link the event to an external website, enter the website URL in the event URL box. Otherwise, create a category containing information and enter the URL of this category in the event URL box;

http://yourdomain.com/event-name-here-c-234.html where “234” is the category ID

It is quite possible to link the event to a product in your system (such as a ticket for the event) by entering the URL of the product in this URL box. When a website visitor clicks the event in the calendar they will be taken to the product page.

Event Notifications

Pearl will automatically email or SMS the selected members of an event. Ensure that the relevant boxes are ticked when you are editing the contacts for an event. This notification uses the default event notification template, but you can create any number of other templates and use this instead. Each Event will remember the last template used for notification emails, allowing you to brand up the notifications according to the event purpose.

Showing events on Your Website

Pearl will show all events in groups where group visibility is set to public on your website calendar. This calendar is available on your website using the following URL:

http://www.yourdomain.com/?p=calendar

Adding People to an Event

To add contacts to an event, open the event to edit it and then use the box in the “Contacts & Notifications” tab to find contacts. Choose the relevant contacts and click “add contacts”. The contacts have been added to the event, but you will need to refresh the main event screen to see them listed and choose their notification settings. Once the contacts are part of the event you will need to set their permissions: admin/user/updates etc. You can restrict the maximum number of users in an event using the box in the “Project” tab of the event edit screen.

By default when creating a job for a project, every member of the project is added to the event with all notifications turned off. When you assign an owner for an event, upon saving the event Pearl will make sure that the owner is set as an administrator for the event.

Event Notes

If you are a user of the event you can add notes to it at any time. You can also upload files with the note which can later be downloaded by any member of the event (via admin only, not currently on the public website). If you tick the “notify contacts” box when you upload the file, then all contacts on the event that are set to receive email notifications will get the file as an email attachment. Event users only see “public” notes, and event admins see all notes.

Only public notes are visible when viewing events on the website portal for Helpdesk or Project Management.

Event statuses

A few select types of events (Tickets, Tasks and Jobs) can be set to any one of a number of configurable statuses. To edit the statuses, click Setup->Event Statuses from the main menu. Each status can be assigned a colour.

Setup->Company Defaults also has some settings that allow you to choose the status at which new events are created, as well as the status that Pearl should set an event to when it is deemed “complete”.

Emailing all contacts on an event

If you have PearlMail enabled, then you can use the Conversation tab to send an email out to all members of the group, or selected members, directly from within the event edit screen. The subject of the email will be appended with the Event ID (eg Ticket#2345) which will allow Pearl to include any reply sent back to your company in the conversation history.