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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.
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.
Text or graphical calendar views
The calendar views display data for a selected month. The view contains a cell for each day of the selected month. The cell for a day contains either a list of items active on the day (text) or a portion of a horizontal bar for each active item (graphical).
Horizontal bars on the calendar
The timeline view and graphical calendar view display horizontal bars. The bars help illustrate the duration and dates of calendar objects.

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.
  - Customizing the calendar appearance
    The calendar displays a time-centric view of your business processes. You can customize the appearance of the calendar to suit the needs of your organization.
  - Timeline view of the calendar
    If you choose a timeline view, you can choose from several date ranges. The screen can display data for a single week, up to data for an entire year.
  - Text or graphical calendar views
    The calendar views display data for a selected month. The view contains a cell for each day of the selected month. The cell for a day contains either a list of items active on the day (text) or a portion of a horizontal bar for each active item (graphical).
    - Monthly calendar
      The monthly calendar view displays a calendar of the selected month. It lists the objects (Projects, Programs, or Plans) you selected and filtered on (for example, Active Projects).
    - Calendar color coding
      You can display objects in a color-coded manner on either the graphical calendar or in the timeline views.
    - Horizontal bars on the calendar
      The timeline view and graphical calendar view display horizontal bars. The bars help illustrate the duration and dates of calendar objects.
    - Brief and detailed views of tasks
      The brief view mode contains only the most essential information about a task: the task name and task ID. Detailed mode contains additional information about the project to which the task belongs. Use the Set View Options dialog box or the Calendar/Timeline Settings page to choose brief or detailed mode to view information about tasks on the calendar.
  - Publishing the calendar
    You can save a snapshot of the calendar at a certain moment in time. When you publish the calendar, you chose which information you want to display and how you want to display it.
- 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.
- 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.

Horizontal bars on the calendar

The timeline view and graphical calendar view display horizontal bars. The bars help illustrate the duration and dates of calendar objects.

Note the following information.

The bars represent the date range for objects that are displayed on the calendar.
The name of the object displays on the bar.
The bars can be colored based on an attribute you select.
The shapes of the bars indicate the following conditions of the object.
- Rounded-end "start": indicates that the object starts on the date where the bar has a rounded end.
- Rounded-end "end": indicates that the object ends on the date where the bar has a rounded end.
- Flat-end "start": indicates that the object starts before the visible date range.
- Flat-end "end": indicates that the object ends after the visible date range.

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