PulsePeople and companies
How information about meeting participants is gathered, and where it appears.
Every time Pulse creates a meeting note, it builds a list of the people and companies involved. Being able to call up all your past notes from someone's name saves hunting for “when was it we discussed that?”. This article explains where the information comes from, where it appears, and what it cannot do.
The lists of people and companies are built from meeting notes created from calendar events. Where no calendar is connected, or a note was created by hand, no information is gathered into the lists. Viewing and searching are done in the desktop app (macOS and Windows).
Where to open it
Open them from the icons in the sidebar at the bottom left. The person icon is the list of people; the building icon is the list of companies.
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Choosing a person or a company from a list shows all the notes from meetings they attended. Use it to check how an exchange has gone, or to remind yourself of last time before a meeting you have not had in a while.
How the information is gathered
Information about people and companies is extracted from calendar events automatically.
- When you start Pulse from a calendar event and create a note, the list of participants on that event is pulled in.
- From the email addresses pulled in, further information — profile picture, job title, employer — is filled in. This happens automatically in the background.
- As you have more meetings with the same person, more notes accumulate against them.
Company information is organised in the same way, from the domains of participants' email addresses.
Using chat with a particular person selected in the list lets you ask questions about meetings with just that person. You can ask things like “gather the requests that came up in meetings with this company”. You can also search directly by name or company name in the search box.
Name the external sources used to fill in job titles and company information according to the suppliers UNCHAIN, Inc. uses. Because the Act on the Protection of Personal Information requires the source and the purpose of use to be set out, keep this consistent with the privacy policy.
What is shown
The lists show only participants in meetings for which a note was created in Pulse. They are not synchronised with a company address book or a business card system, so people you have not met, and participants in meetings where Pulse was not used, do not appear.
Internal colleagues and external contacts appear side by side. Clients' names and employers are included, so take care what is on screen when sharing your screen.
What it cannot do
At present you cannot add people or companies by hand. The lists are built automatically from actual meetings and calendar events.
Where someone does not appear in the list, it is usually one of the following.
- They were not listed as a participant on the calendar event.
- The meeting was recorded from a note created by hand rather than from a calendar event.
- They responded “no” to the calendar invitation.
Occasionally a name is spelt slightly differently from reality, or the company name or logo is another company's. This happens most easily with people who share a name, companies that use several domains, and just after a company changes its name. If you notice it, contact tharada@the-unchain.com and we will check and correct it.
Job titles and company names are filled in automatically, so they can differ from reality. Check against primary sources such as a business card or an email signature before copying them into a quotation, a contract or a proposal.
Things to watch in a Japanese organisation
Meeting participants' names, employers, job titles and email addresses are personal data under the Act on the Protection of Personal Information. Being able to view and search them within Pulse is ordinary use, but we recommend settling the following internally.
- Taking it outside the company — where you export the lists and load them into another system, check that handling clients' contact details that way is within your internal rules. The export steps are in Exporting notes in bulk.
- What happens when someone leaves — the lists are tied to the notes a person created. Deleting a leaver's account loses the notes tied to it as well. Agree a routine of moving anything that needs to be handed over into a shared folder beforehand. See Workspaces for details.
- Administrator controls — there are settings restricting export and sharing at workspace level. See Controlling sharing.
Set out, to match UNCHAIN, Inc.'s practice, where requests from clients' staff and others to correct or delete a name or employer are received and how they are handled. How requests for disclosure, correction, cessation of use and the like are received is set out in the privacy policy.
If something is not working
Q. Only internal colleagues appear in the list of people
A. External participants may not be listed on the calendar event. Where the practice is to book only the meeting room and invite the other side by a separate email, participant information is not pulled in. Add the other side's email addresses to the event before recording the meeting.
Q. The company name or logo is wrong
A. Companies are inferred from email domains, so mix-ups happen with companies that use several domains and groups with many subsidiaries. Contact tharada@the-unchain.com and we will look into it.
Q. I want to remove a particular person from the list
A. There is currently no way to remove an individual person or company from the list. The lists are built from notes, so deleting the notes concerned is reflected in the lists. For deleting notes, see Deleting and restoring notes.