Business Attributes

Business Attributes differ from interaction properties, although the two share some names (for example, MediaType and Case ID).

• Interaction properties are fields in the Interactions table. Their main purpose is to identify and describe interactions during processing.
  
• Business Attributes are objects in the configuration database. They have two purposes.
  
• To represent data concerning areas other than traditional telephony. Each Business Attribute contains a range of possible values for a data category. In this sense, Business Attributes are like a dictionary.
  
• To convey data between software components that have no other means of communication. Examples are Category Structure and Screening Rules. These are among the Business Attributes that you must not change in Configuration Manager.
  

Category Structure is an example of a Business Attribute that users must not change. You create and edit categories in Knowledge Manager. The categories that you create also appear in Configuration Manager, in Resources > Business Attributes > Category Structure. It is possible to select a category in Configuration Manager, open its Properties dialog box, and make changes as you would to any configuration object. But this could create severe problems and the system would probably not operate properly when trying to handle this category. Knowledge Manager is the only safe tool to use for creating and editing categories.

The following table lists the Business Attributes and Business Attribute Values that are relevant to eServices but are not represented in the interactions table.

Business Attributes Not in the interactions Table

Name	Change
CategoryStructure	Prohibited
ContactAttributes	Prohibited
ContactAttributes/AccountNumber	Allowed
ContactAttributes/LastName	Prohibited
ContactAttributes/PhoneNumber	Prohibited
ContactAttributes/PIN	Allowed
ContactAttributes/Title	Prohibited
EmailAccounts	Allowed
InteractionAttributes	Prohibited
Language	Allowed
RootInteractionID	Prohibited
ScreeningRules	Prohibited
StopProcessingReason	Allowed

The next table repeats three of the Business Attributes from the preceding table for which change is allowed, and adds information. Note that the first two of these Business Attributes must be present for eServices to work properly.

Business Attributes, Change Allowed

Name	Default Value	Comment
EmailAccounts	None	The eServices configuration wizard creates two values: one for the account that E-mail Server pulls e-mails from in order to bring them into the eServices system, and one for an external agent. You may want to use Configuration Manager to create additional values, for example if you want additional e-mail addresses to be available for Forward and Redirect objects in routing strategies. Configure the address for this value on the Annex tab > General section > address option. The address must comply with RFC2822 and therefore it must be encoded according to RFC2047. Examples: legal@mycompany.com ""Legal Dpt"" <legal@mycompany.com> Type = custom
Language	English	Used by Knowledge Manager (along with Tenant ) to group category trees. You must add the value unknown if you want to train a model that classifies by language. See See Training and See Notes on Language.
StopProcessingReason	AutoResponded Forwarded Normal Re-directed Sent Terminated	Must be selected in the IRD Stop Interaction object. You can manually add other values by creating them as Attribute Values of StopProcessingReason, under Business Attributes in Configuration Manager.