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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.
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.
Attachment markup types in Unica Plan
You can use markup tools to add feedback directly on top of an attachment. Unica Plan has two different methods for marking up attachments: native Unica Plan markup and Adobe markup. Your administrator chose one of these methods for markup during installation.

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.
  - Approval concepts
    An approval is an item or group of items that approvers review and respond to, either by approving, suggesting changes, or denying. The approval process makes sure the right people view and sign off on content, creatives, and marketing objects.
  - Approval process workflow
    To begin the approval process, you create an approval, add approvers, and add approval items. Then, you submit the approval and the review process begins. Unica Plan sends the approval process to approvers based on their sequence and whether the reviewers are required or optional. The approval process can go through several iterations as all the approvers complete their review.
  - Reassigning team approvals
    When your team is assigned as an approver, you can accept the approval or reassign it to someone else on your team. Reassignment options depend on how your team is configured.
  - Approval processes linked to workflow tasks
    Approval processes can be linked to workflow tasks. If an approval process is linked to the workflow, editing the approval process changes the workflow task.
  - Attachment markup types in Unica Plan
    You can use markup tools to add feedback directly on top of an attachment. Unica Plan has two different methods for marking up attachments: native Unica Plan markup and Adobe markup. Your administrator chose one of these methods for markup during installation.
    - Marking up attachments
      Anyone who has permission to view an approval process can add comments to attached approval items.
    - Adobe Acrobat markup in Unica Plan
      Adobe Acrobat markup is one option for marking up attachments.
    - Native Unica Plan markup
      Use native Unica Plan markup to comment on attachments.
- 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.
- 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.

Attachment markup types in Unica Plan

You can use markup tools to add feedback directly on top of an attachment. Unica Plan has two different methods for marking up attachments: native Unica Plan markup and Adobe markup. Your administrator chose one of these methods for markup during installation.

Unica Plan users can mark up attachments for plans, programs, projects, and marketing objects in either of the following ways.

Unica Plan can open a PDF document in Adobe™ Acrobat. Users can use all of the markup features in Acrobat to make comments, then save the comments in Unica Plan.
Unica Plan can be set up to use native markup function, which allows users to mark up the following file types.
- PDF (each page of the PDF is converted to an image for markup)
- GIF
- JPG (RGB only, not CMYK)
- PNG
- BMP
- HTML pages and hosted websites

During installation, an administrator chooses which type of markup to enable throughout the application.

For both types of markup, note the following behaviors.

You access the Unica Plan markup tool by clicking the View/Add Markup link for an individual approval item.
Unica Plan tags markups with the name of the person who made the comments, so everyone can view all review comments at once, or one reviewer's comments at a time.

Native markup for websites

You can upload an entire website for review. However, the following limitations apply.

native markup does not support markup on websites that include or are built entirely in Flash.
Pages that require server-side processing, such as CGI, ASP, ASPX, CFM, do not work properly in the markup tool.
Framed sites are not supported.

As an alternative to uploading HTML files, consider a URL to link to externally hosted content.

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