Allow linking a person to multiple organizations
planned
Jerrie Pelser
Our application allows for a single user account (i.e. a person in Ortto) to belong to multiple organizations. When I assign a person to an organization using the organizations/contacts/add endpoint, and that person already belongs to another organization, they will be removed from the original organization and reassigned to the new one.
It would be great in Ortto can allow for many-to-many relationships between people and organizations.
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Mark Progano
We have "clients" (B2B) who have their own "customers" (B2B2C), we offer support to the end "customers" and typically the end "customer" works with multiple of our "clients".
Having multiple organize to a single person would be very helpful!!
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Ekrem Kenter
We also need this feature, is there a recommended approach to tackle this until this feature is shipped?
Peter Bartlett
Ekrem Kenter: There are some workarounds, but they each bring their own compromises, so the best approach would depend on your particular use case.
- You could try creating a new/duplicate contact for each organisation you need to link the person too.
- You could add extra custom fields (particularly JSON object fields) to the contact or Org so you can store data about each Org the person belongs too.
- You could use custom activities to record the data the contact does per organisation
- You could use an external JSON endpoint and use the dynamic content from that in your emails for each Organisation the contact should belong too.
Of course, the best solution will be to allow Multiple Organisations, and we are actively working on that problem now, but it will take some time until it's ready.
Please follow up with our Support team if you have further questions.
Thanks!
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Anthony Alaribe
This is a blocker for us as well
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Eric Lessman
This would be a lifesaver for us. We have a client in the automotive industry and they commonly deal with Agencies and Dealerships. An Agent is associated to one Agency, and potentially many Dealerships. It would be stellar to be able to reference them this way in Ortto for mass communications.
Michael Sharkey
Eric Lessman: We are looking at ways to give you complete control of the data model in the future.
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Eric Lessman
Michael Sharkey: Music to my ears if they were my eyes!
Michael Sharkey
Eric Lessman: Please be patient though, not an easy problem to solve at scale/speed. Might take us the whole year!
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Eric Lessman
Michael Sharkey: I can definitely provide patience!
Michael Sharkey
marked this post as
planned
Jack Gardner
I feel like this is quite a common scenario, and one that we are also struggling with.
I can understand that it would be difficult to implement if your database has not been structured with this in mind from the outset, but I'm sure many SAAS businesses need this functionality.
In the meantime can anyone think of a way around this? Only thing I can think of is creating duplicate users with the same email address, but that would mean I'd need to store multiple Ortto Ids for a single user to keep track of them.
Michael Sharkey
Jack Gardner: Hey Jack, we plan on adding custom objects this year. Bear with us, we know this is an issue for some and are working hard to find a really great solution.
Jerrie Pelser
Jack Gardner: Yeah, I work around this by creating duplicate users with the same address. I match on the external id, which is a compound key made up of the account id (i.e. the organization) and user id from my internal tables. I then store the Ortto Id not on my internal user table, but in the table that manages the many-to-many relationship between accounts and users
Jack Gardner
Michael Sharkey: any update on this Michael? We are getting more and more multi-brand customers and it's becoming difficult to maintain.
Peter Bartlett
Jack Gardner: this is our next big focus area to solve, as Mike said, it's not a trivial problem to solve well, but we are working on it and should have some updates ready early next year.
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Nicole Roundy
Peter Bartlett: Manifesting an update here.
Peter Bartlett
Nicole Roundy: We continue to work on this, we have some big and exciting changes around how you can handle multiple organizations for your contacts on the way, but it is a big change, so will still be a few months off unfortunately. It will be worth the wait!