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User Guide
With Unica Plan, you organize the people, tasks, and budget for marketing programs, while you reduce costs and time to market.
Alerts and the message board
You can use alerts and the message board both to communicate information to other users of Unica Plan. Alerts and the message board are available for plans, programs, projects, requests, assets, accounts, approvals, invoices, tasks, teams, and marketing objects.
Posting a message on the message board
On the message board, you post and read messages about a particular plan, program, project, asset, account, approval, or invoice object. You can use this feature as a method of communicating information about an object. When you post a message to the message board, any user who has permission to access that object can view the posted message.

User Guide
With Unica Plan, you organize the people, tasks, and budget for marketing programs, while you reduce costs and time to market.
- Introduction
  Unica Plan is a tool for enterprise planning, collaboration, and workflow that provides a complete solution for the needs of marketers. You can use Unica Plan to get a comprehensive and holistic view of all marketing projects across your company.
- Common tasks
- Plans
  Plans capture the objectives of a business unit or geographic area for a specific timeframe, such as a year or a quarter. A plan is the container for your marketing programs and projects.
- Programs
  Programs are the child-objects of Plans. Programs can contain multiple projects to organize work for your organization.
- Projects
  A project organizes all the information that is related to develop and run one or more related marketing initiatives. Projects contain general information, resources, and attachments for the marketing initiative. Projects also typically organize the people who work on the marketing initiative, including who completes which tasks, and the timeline to complete the tasks. Projects can also include budget information. Monitoring features ensure that everyone knows whether the project is completed on time.
- Workflows
  To help you complete different workflow-related efforts, the Workflow tab offers different view modes and an edit mode.
- Approvals
  An approval process streamlines the process of having your work reviewed and approved. Multiple users can review work in parallel or in an order that represents your business processes.
- People and teams
  In Unica Plan, you assign work to teams or individual users.
- Calendar
  Historically, organizations produced paper-based calendars and updated them with the latest information. The calendar feature provides marketing groups with electronic means to view and update calendar data.
- Grids
  A grid is a spreadsheet-like presentation of data. Grids allow Unica Plan users to store all campaign- and project-related data within the project.
- Marketing objects
  A marketing object is any work product a team develops and reuses in the course of its marketing activities. Marketing objects can represent physical items (such as a letter or banner ad) or a business component (such as a credit card offer, a target segment definition, or a rewards program definition).
- Assets and asset libraries
  Unica Plan provides centralized management, secure storage, and web-based access for digital assets.
- Budgets
  In Unica Plan, a budget coordinates expenses of plans, programs, and projects. After you establish the plan budget, you can fund linked programs, and ultimately projects, from it. Unica Plan tracks budgets of child programs and projects in the form of allocations, forecasted or committed spending, and actual expenses.
- Invoices
  In Unica Plan, you can view all changes that were made to an invoice, including the time and date of the changes and the type of changes made.
- Accounts
  A top-level Unica Plan account represents a corporate account that is established by a finance department for tracking and controlling expenditures and cash flows for specific areas of the business. Accounts can have subaccounts.
- Metrics
  Metrics are used for management reports and analysis. View metrics on the Tracking tab for plans, programs, and projects.
- Reports
  By default, Unica Plan provides a set of predefined reports and dashboard components. The Unica Plan reports package provides additional example reports and dashboard report components that are created in IBM® Cognos®, a separate business intelligence application.
- Searches
  You can perform simple and advanced searches in Unica Plan.
- Alerts and the message board
  You can use alerts and the message board both to communicate information to other users of Unica Plan. Alerts and the message board are available for plans, programs, projects, requests, assets, accounts, approvals, invoices, tasks, teams, and marketing objects.
  - The Alerts page
    When you receive an alert, go to the Alerts page to view it. Alerts are also sent to affected users' email addresses (for each user that has a valid email address that is set up).
  - Alerts on outside email addresses
    You can receive alerts to an email address that is outside the domain of your organization.
  - Comments for alerts
    Users can add comments to some alerts before the system sends the alerts.
  - Subscribing to alerts for an object
    Users who are not administrators can override default settings within a plan, program, project, or project request. By overriding the default, you can control the alerts that each object owner and participant receives.
  - Brief and detailed task alerts
    When someone makes edits to a workflow, they can make numerous edits that can affect several tasks, members, and dates. You can determine whether users receive detailed or brief alerts about the workflow changes.
  - Posting a message on the message board
    On the message board, you post and read messages about a particular plan, program, project, asset, account, approval, or invoice object. You can use this feature as a method of communicating information about an object. When you post a message to the message board, any user who has permission to access that object can view the posted message.
  - Configuring a Collaboration Tool
    You can configure a collaboration tool with Unica Plan. Unica Plan provides out-of-the-box settings that you can use to collaborate using Slack. Slack is not packaged with the Unica installer. You have to create your own Slack account. The Plan administrator will set up the configurations required to use the collaborations tool.
- Reading a message on the message board
  You can read messages that were previously posted to the message board, if you have permission to view that object. Messages can be posted for plans, programs, projects, assets, accounts, approvals, or invoices.
- Checklists and To-dos
  Checklists are independent of other features of Plan and you can use checklists to maintain lists of to-dos for yourself or any other user.

Posting a message on the message board

On the message board, you post and read messages about a particular plan, program, project, asset, account, approval, or invoice object. You can use this feature as a method of communicating information about an object. When you post a message to the message board, any user who has permission to access that object can view the posted message.

About this task

To post a message on the message board, complete the following steps.

Procedure

Open the list page for the object type of the object for which you want to post a message.
For example, click Operations > Accounts.

You can post messages for plans, programs, projects, assets, accounts, approvals, or invoices.
Click the plan, program, project, account, approval, or invoice for which you want to post a message.
Click Communicate () in the Unica Plan toolbar and select Post a Message.

The Messages window is displayed. From version 12.1.3, if the administrator has configured Slack as the collaboration tool, with Unica Plan, you can click Slack channel to directly access the channel on the Slack application and read the conversation on Slack. By clicking Slack channel on Plan, you can avoid browsing through various channels on Slack to locate the appropriate channel.
Enter your message.
Select a delivery option.
By default, you also receive an email alert when you post a message.
Click Post Comment.
The Messages window displays all the posted comments for this object. Your new comment displays at the top of the list.
If you chose an email option, your message includes a line that lists the email recipients, such as:
(cc'd to Mary Manager, Connie Contact, aartiste@mycompany.com)
Full names displays for users who are identified in Unica Platform, otherwise the email address displays.
Click Close if this comment is the only one you want to post now, or click Post a Comment to post an another comment.

Unica Plan posts the message to the message board and sends email messages as specified. The email messages contain the text that you posted and a link to the object you identified as the subject.

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