- Overview
With Unica Plan, you organize the people, tasks, and budget for marketing programs, while you reduce costs and time to market.
- Unica 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.
- 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.
- Unica 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.
- Forms
A form is a collection of attribute fields that gather information about an object.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Unica Plan in a clustered environment
If you are running Unica Plan in a clustered environment, do all system administration tasks on one instance.
- Unica Plan with LDAP integration
A set of files exist in the location <plan_home>/conf/<locale>/ldap_conf.xml. These files contain the LDAP server settings. These settings are used in any form attribute of type external data source.
- Optional features
Unica Plan offers several options that extend the core, out-of-box features. Your organization can integrate Unica Plan with other HCL products, or enable add-on modules.
- Unica Plan documentation and help
Different people in your organization use Unica Plan to accomplish different tasks. Information about Unica Plan is available in a set of guides, each of which is intended for use by team members with specific objectives and skill sets.
- Users and user groups
You create and manage users and user groups with features installed with theUnica Platform
- Unica Plan administration process overview
After you install Unica Plan, the administrator must configure the product and build objects, such as lists definitions and templates, before users can start working.
- Administrative Settings page
When you select Settings > Plan Settings, the Administrative Settings page appears.
- Setting your timezone
You can set your timezone so you see Unica Plan dates and times in the locale time. You customize your timezone in the Unica Platform user settings.
- System-wide non-work dates
In Unica Plan, you can account for dates when, by default, no work is done on tasks. Unica Plan does not include non-work time in task duration calculations.
- Triggers
Triggers can perform powerful custom validations and both pre- and post-event processing. Use triggers to integrate the out-of-box processing capabilities of Unica Plan with custom business processes.
- Publishing advanced searches
To help users find objects efficiently, Unica Plan provides an advanced search feature. After users enter criteria for a search, they can provide an identifying name and save the search for future use. Administrators manage saved searches.
- Viewing a list of locked objects
Unica Plan includes a tool for viewing a list of the objects that are currently locked in the application.
- Unica Plan Performance
Unica Plan provides configuration properties that you can configure to increase system performance. To access these configuration properties, click Settings > Configuration > Marketing Operations.
- Unica Plan markup options
Unica Plan provides markup tools for making comments on attachments. When Unica Plan users send approvals for review, approvers can place their comments directly in the electronic file, where they can be viewed by other users.
- Configuring system logs
To log configuration, debugging, and error information, Unica Plan uses the Apache log4j utility. To change the types of messages that this utility includes in the system log, you must change the value of the level property in the plan_log4j.xml file placed in the <Plan_Home>/conf/ location. The plan_log4j.xml file is referenced in the JVM system properites by the -Dlog4j2.configurationFile and -Dlog4.configurationFile. If you are using an XML file other than plan_log4j.xml in the properties -Dlog4j2.configurationFile and -Dlog4.configurationFile, then you must use the same file, instead of using the plan_log4j.xml file, for the earlier mentioned purpose
- Integrating Unica Content Integration
Unica Content Integration facilitates easy integration with Content Management Systems and enables searching content from the them.
- 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.
- 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.