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Administrator Guide
With Unica Plan, you organize the people, tasks, and budget for marketing programs, while you reduce costs and time to market.
Marketing object types
Marketing objects are the work products that a team develops and reuses in the course of marketing activities. In addition to a set of standard marketing object types that is supplied with Unica Plan, you can create custom marketing object types.
States for marketing objects
Every marketing object has a state that indicates its status. The state changes as the marketing object moves through its lifecycle.
State transitions
When users work with marketing object instances, they can change the status of an individual instance while they edit it. They can also change the status of multiple selected instances on the list page for that object type. Users choose from a list of possible transitions: the values that are available depend on the status of the instance and on the state transitions defined for the marketing object type.

Administrator Guide
With Unica Plan, you organize the people, tasks, and budget for marketing programs, while you reduce costs and time to market.
- Overview
  With Unica Plan, you organize the people, tasks, and budget for marketing programs, while you reduce costs and time to market.
- Plan interface customization options
  Unica Plan offers options for customizing the user interface. You can customize or rebrand the Unica Plan interface to match your organization's needs.
- Unica Plan integrations
  Unica Plan offers integration with Unica Campaign, Unica Centralized Offer Management, and Unica Journey. Integration with Unica Centralized Offer Management is only used for migrating offer management capability from Unical Plan to Unica Centralized Offer Management.
- Marketing object types
  Marketing objects are the work products that a team develops and reuses in the course of marketing activities. In addition to a set of standard marketing object types that is supplied with Unica Plan, you can create custom marketing object types.
  - Defining a custom marketing object type
    To define a new marketing object type for your organization, you complete several tasks.
  - States for marketing objects
    Every marketing object has a state that indicates its status. The state changes as the marketing object moves through its lifecycle.
    - The global states file
      The global states file lists all possible states for marketing objects in your installation. The globalstates.xml file is in the Plan_Home\conf\locale folder.
    - State transitions
      When users work with marketing object instances, they can change the status of an individual instance while they edit it. They can also change the status of multiple selected instances on the list page for that object type. Users choose from a list of possible transitions: the values that are available depend on the status of the instance and on the state transitions defined for the marketing object type.
  - Custom marketing object types
    You add a marketing object type to Unica Plan before you create marketing object templates, and before users create instances of that type.
  - Marketing object templates
    After you define a marketing object type, you create at least one marketing object template for that type. Users cannot create instances of that marketing object type until you create a template.
  - Associations between marketing object types
    You can associate one marketing object type with a project or with another marketing object.
- Project and request deactivation
  After your organization uses Unica Plan for some time, the user interface can become cluttered with out-dated or unwanted projects and requests. You can deactivate projects and requests to reduce clutter and simplify searches.
- Plan reports
  Unica Plan provides a set of default reports and dashboard report components. The Unica Plan reports package provides extra reports and dashboard report components, which are created in IBM® Cognos®, a separate business intelligence application.
- Template Basics
  A template for a marketing object type, such as a plan, program, or project, defines the information that your organization wants to capture about the object. Then, you use templates to create object instances. If you have the Financial Management module installed, an invoice template defines the information that your organization wants to capture in invoices.
- Adding or editing templates
  After you identify the template components that you need, you can create the template. You need to build components before assembling them in the template.
- Program and project templates
  Program and project templates have additional tabs that customize the object instances that are made from the template.
- About forms
  A form is a collection of attribute fields that gather information about an object.
- About attributes
  An attribute defines a piece of information that you want to gather from a user. For example, the information can be text, integers, dates, or a choice from a predefined list. In Unica Plan, you define attributes to collect these different types of information, and then place them on forms. Then, you can add or more forms to templates as tabs. When users create items, they select a template. Each attribute that is included in the template corresponds to a field or other user interface control on the tabs that collect information.
- About metrics
  Metrics measure the performance of an object and are always numeric. Typical metrics include financial metrics, such as cost and revenue, and performance metrics, such as the number of contacts and the number of responses in a particular marketing campaign.
- Multiple locale support
  For organizations with Unica Plan users in multiple locales, you can translate the labels and text strings in the user interface for each locale.
- About security
  You configure security policies that grant users permission to access specific objects and features through assigned access roles.
- Setting up alerts
  Alerts are notifications of important changes that users need to know about, or reminders about actions that they need to take.
- About list definitions
  The user interface of Unica Plan presents several list box controls that you can configure to provide a customized set of options.
- Implementing project health rules
  To help project owners and participants track the overall status of their projects, you configure the system to calculate project health.
- Exporting and importing metadata
  You can transfer data structures (metadata) between Unica Plan systems using the export and import features.
- Setting up libraries for digital assets
  Through the optional Digital Asset Management module, Unica Plan provides centralized management, secure storage, and web-based access for digital assets.
- Setting up accounts
  An account in Unica Plan represents a specific corporate General Ledger (GL) account that is established by a finance department to track and control expenditures and cash flows. Accounts are a feature of the optional Financial Management module.
- About advanced topics
  This chapter provides information about advanced customization options for the Unica Plan interface.
- Unica Plan Rest API
  The Unica Plan REST API is a façade that provides a client view of a running Unica Plan instance.

State transitions

When users work with marketing object instances, they can change the status of an individual instance while they edit it. They can also change the status of multiple selected instances on the list page for that object type. Users choose from a list of possible transitions: the values that are available depend on the status of the instance and on the state transitions defined for the marketing object type.

By default, the following transitions are defined.


Transition	From Status	To Status
Start	Not Started	In Progress
Cancel	Not Started	Cancelled
Continue	On Hold	In Progress
Cancel	In Progress	Cancelled
Pause	In Progress	On Hold
Finish	Not Started or In Progress	Completed
Restart	Cancelled	Not Started or In Progress

Flowchart of default states and transitions

For example, if a marketing object instance is In Progress, a user can make these choices.

Pause it: change its status to On Hold
Finish it: change its status to Completed
Cancel it: change its status to Cancelled

You add or remove transitions when you create a marketing object type.

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