How do shared phones now work in 7.95

I believe (would need to find time to go test this thoroughly) that if you add a phone number to the Primary Business, it will only appear on the Relationship Record, not the Bio1 Tab of the Individual.  No more phone sharing.  Which for us is good, because phone sharing was causing someone's mobile number to appear on spouse records when it shouldn't be.  I think that's also part of the thinking here, that phone numbers are more mobile now, and more tied to just one person rather than a household.  Pros and cons.


We were already storing Primary Business Phones on the Bio1 Tab regardless of what Address was marked as Preferred (and Home/Personal Phones if the Business Address was Preferred) because our fundraising staff wanted to see all related phones in one place.  So this helps with that, and the comment field helps in noting which org the number applies to (but there is still a Phone Grid on Relationship Records, if you prefer to use that).


I wish instead of Tabs in the Phones Grid it had just become sortable.  And I don't care for the Primary and Inactive checkboxes, either, because they're near-impossible to use in Query.

Jen, would you be able to elaborate on the difficulties of querying on Inactive and Primary please? In 7.93 I often use "Do Not Contact equals No" when querying for people who have at least one valid phone/email, and was hoping I'd be able to use the new fields in the same way.

I asked Blackbaud about the phone number issue with individual relationship (and the individual is also a constituent) when talking about a relationship with a constituent organization .  Their recommendation was to create a duplicate non-constituent record for the individual to house their contact information to the organization.  This is not my favorite recommendation because it is hard enough to stay ahead of duplicate records in the system.  Our current thought is that we would create special phone types that would live only on the individual's relationship record to the organization (for example, all phone types for relationship numbers would begin with "Rel").  We would duplicate this phone number manually on their constituent record if we knew it was a direct or cell  number for them (this time we would classify it as Cell or Business).  This means that phone numbers could be duplicated when looking at the individual's relationship on the company's constituent record (because you would see the source phone numbers and the relationship specific phone numbers).  We have not put this into practice as we are still in 7.93 and hope to complete migration by Qtr 1 2017.  Our hope is by tracking phone numbers this way that we could still pull directories for organizational contacts and grab their relationship phone numbers.