Auto Populate Fields in Unica Plan

    A few months ago I embarked on an awesome change order request for a client that housed an executive approval type document outside of Unica Plan. Their goal was to find a way to incorporate the form, which included marketing details such as strategy, competitor information, and campaign details, seamlessly into Plan. Outside the system, the form was completed by marketers and submitted to their respective director or campaign executive for approval. 


The problem:

1. The form was managed outside the system (Unica Plan) requiring marketers to manage their time and effort between planning processes within the tool and outside the tool, some of which included redundant tasks.

2. There existed common fields on the form and current project templates (redundancy)

3. Executives that are less IT savvy would need to access the tool once the form was incorporated into the system.  

The solution (in a nutshell):

1. Introduce a new form to an existing project template. This brings marketing planning processes within a single system making it easier to manage and more importantly, easily tracked!

2. Remove redundancies between existing fields in Plan templates and fields on the latest form by creating auto populating functionality. The new form created should auto populate data into fields on shared project forms through a database linkage on object id. Now, Unica's Admin Guide and Forms Editor doesn't make this capability easy to implement. It requires a bit of creativity. Once the skeletal of the form is created through Forms Editor you will need to make manual edits within the xml file. I literally had to teach myself XML code for this solution, you can learn anything on Google!

3. Add an approval process on the workflow tab. Any approval created sends an email to an approver, the approver is then sent to the summary tab of the intended project. Therefore the newly introduced form should be added to the summary tab of a project template. This sends the less savvy approver directly to the content that is relevant to him or her. Yes, it does require additional licenses if these approvers don't already hold a license BUT only the most basic license is needed.


    While this was a painful solution to create, it was implemented successfully and 50+ projects and counting are leveraging it. I experienced many firsts during this change order: designing AND implementing a Plan solution, writing XML code, creating a form and updating existing forms to auto populated data inputted from the newly introduced form, and creating a new template and transferring functionality over from existing templates.

All and all it was a major success!

For any questions on any part of this solution or any Unica Campaign, Plan or Emessage related question, feel free to leave a comment below.