Contact Management – Knack 101

Some things to go over here today as part of our webinar as we get started. Hopefully, everyone can see my screen.

We are going to be learning the basics of Knack. My name, by the way, is Renasha, AKA Roe. Everyone calls me Roe here. I’m our onboarding team lead here at NAC. You will also notice my colleague is also on the call, Max. He is also a part of our onboarding team, and we are here to help you get started and to build out your solutions.

So if you’ve got any specific questions or if you would like to see something specifically shared throughout this webinar, we are going to have the first part of this webinar. We will be going through and demoing, I believe, our project management — a simple project management app or our contact directory.

Then we’re also going to dive into a live build of that.

There will also be live Q&A, so if you do have your use case or specific things that you’re getting stuck on when building your app, feel free to share that in the chat section. You’ll notice our conference room or in the Q&A section. Max will be keeping an eye out there, so feel free again to share any details there and we’re happy to dive into that in the second half of our webinar.

Focus on Contact Directory

So we’re actually not going to be looking at the project manager. We’re going to actually be taking a look at our contact directory, which is kind of like the early stages of starting to build out a CRM.

So with that said, let’s kind of dive into a live application and we’re going to look specifically at our contact directory.

This is what a live app looks like in Knack. So if you’ve created an account and you’ve gotten started with Knack, and maybe you haven’t quite built out your app, or maybe you’ve explored some of our template apps — this is our contact directory template app. So we’ve got companies.

Those companies then have contacts that are associated with the company, and you can see here that we’ve got some details captured with each company. So a little bit of what we’re looking at here. Again, this is our live app. With NAC, we have different ways of displaying your data within your application.

You can see here we’ve got a grid view that’s showing just a table of all of our records — all of our company records. But each one of our tables within Knack has a variety of field types. So you can see just within this one view, this grid view that we’re looking at, we’ve got text fields, we’ve got address fields, we’ve got link fields, we’ve got multiple choice options, as well as you’ll see additional links that allow you to view more details about an individual record.

So lots of ways to display your data, as well as ways to capture data in the way that it needs to be to make your data as clean as possible going into the system. We also have menu views that you see here, which translate to a button on the page. So we can click on that, and it brings us to a form where we might want to add a new company. And once we submit that, we can reload this form if we want to add another company, or we can navigate back to our company page where we can see all of our companies again — and we can see that new company that we added here as well.

Again, we’ve got links to view more details about an individual record. So that means if we’ve got more information that we want to show, but we’re showing on one view some high-level information, we can give the users of the live app a way to view more details about a particular company. So in this sense, we can dive in and see contacts that are associated with the company.

We can now use one of these buttons here to edit the company. So if we wanted to go through and edit the address or change the URL or the industry, we can.

So again, we’re looking at views — ways to display your data — as well as ways to add data and update your information with our form views.

You’ll see we also have a relational database here where we can show parent-child relationships. So our parent information would be the company, but then we have contacts that are tied to the company. So we can see all the individual contacts tied to the company, and we can again further dive in to see what kind of engagements we’ve had with this particular contact that’s associated with the company. You can see that we have a way here to add notes. We can add new notes based on any engagements that we’ve had.

Here we’re looking again at a contact directory that’s almost similar to a CRM — if you’re looking to build out this kind of use case within Knack.

Then again, I have links to take me back to my previous pages where I can see now some new information here related to or the additional details or the contacts related to the company.

So jumping back here, if I scroll down a little bit more on the page, you’ll see that I also have what we call a search view. This allows you to search your data, search your information. So if you wanted to do some more ad hoc searches, ad hoc queries, reporting — a search view is another way to display your data and to search your data in more detail. So if we wanted to pull up companies by the type of industry that they were a part of, we can say, “Show me all my tech companies,” and do a quick search and then pull up all of our tech companies in the system.

So this is just a couple ways to view your data. We’re going to dive a little bit more once we start getting into the build of an application of what views are available. And again, views are just ways to display your data or to add and update your data within the system.

We’ve got another navigation item up here — our Contacts tab — where we can see now all of our contacts. So this is saying, “Hey, we don’t want to look at our companies. We just want to look at all the contacts regardless of what company they are part of.” So now we can see all of our contacts in the system. And again, we can click on a contact and see if there are any notes related to this contact. We can edit that contact as well and add new notes.

So hopefully, this kind of gives you an idea of what an app looks like. We are definitely going to be diving a little bit deeper into this — taking a look at this particular app and how it’s built in the Knack end — and then we’ll start building out something like this from scratch.

Exploring the Knack Builder

So I’m going to jump into the back end. And if you’ve gotten started with Knack and you’ve started exploring our builder, this is what we call the builder of an app — the Knack builder. So you’ve got a couple of different working environments within the system. You’ve got your dashboard.

So if I navigate back here to my dashboard, you’ll see that I have a list of all my apps within the system once this loads up. But then I can go to my account settings and see different details there. I can also search for my apps. You can see I can search for my contact directory.

I have quite a few in here.

I can then dive into the settings or take a look at my contact directory, and you’ll see that I’ve got all of that information here. I can see my tables that have been set up with my contact directory as well. So, again, we were taking a look at our dashboard. We’re now looking at the builder for the building environment for a single app, which is our contact directory.

We’ll start to dive into more details about what we’re looking at here.

So here is our contact directory, and we are going to work our way from top left to bottom here, and then we’ll work left to right as we go through things. The first tab you’ll want to take notice of is our Data tab. This is where our tables will live. We can add new tables.

You’ll see the option here to add a table. But once we go to click to add a new table, you’ll be redirected to a page where you can add your table either from scratch, import your data, or drag a CSV or an Excel file into this area here. So we can start with a blank table, we can start with a premade table — these are tables that have fields already created for you.

We can also use Google Sheets. If you’re using Google Sheets and you want to bring your data in from Google, you can definitely do that as well.

That’s how you would create these tables that are listed here. Tables consist of fields.

As we mentioned in the live app, we were able to see the different field types for our companies. We can go into Knack and there are different field types there. So taking a look at our company table here, we can add fields by clicking on the “Add Field” option. And this is where we can see a list of all of the different field types that are available within Knack. Making sure your data goes in the way that you want it to go in is super important. If it needs to be a number, we’ve got a number field for you. If you need an equation field, we’ve got the equation field for you.

And we’ve got multiple choice, we’ve got date fields. As you continue to scroll down, you’ll see that we have even more field types to choose from — file, name fields, email, phone, link, and more importantly, our connection field, which is how we tie our tables together. More on that in a bit.

So, again, jumping back here, we’re taking a look at our Data tab. We’re looking at all of the different tables here. Tables can be added here. You can continue to add fields to your table by clicking here.

And each one of these fields then has further ways to edit that field. So I can click on this field once it’s been added, and I’ll have settings that allow me to set this field to “required.” I can set it to “unique.” I can even set some validation and conditional rules with that.

So I’m not going to dive too deep here just yet, but I wanted to give you kind of an idea if you’re starting with a template app or if you’re using AI to get started with your application.

You may have an app that’s completely built. So what is it that you’re looking at if you’re starting with a template app?

Working our way down, you’ll see that we have a Records tab. You can also navigate to your records here as well.

So as long as I’m on a selected table, I can also see my records in my database here with Knack. All of those records that we were seeing in our live app, we’re able to see them here as well.

This is where you can do things like importing your data. You can export your data from here as well. You can do some batch updating and batch deleting.

Again, as I navigate through my tables, I can see the records listed.

You’ll see what your record counts are here.

This is important to know as you are looking at pricing and how our pricing works within Knack.

We base our pricing off of rows — think “rows” or “records” in the system. Records are just a row in your tables that you see here, and they add up across your tables. So: records, the amount of storage you need, and features that you might want access to.

So that’s our Records tab. And again, we can dive into this a little bit deeper in a moment here.

Automating Tasks in Knack

On our Pro Plan and above, we have a feature called Tasks that is available to customers when you’re looking to automate things within the system. So think, “I want to trigger an email on someone’s birthday.” We’re looking at a contact directory. Maybe we’re capturing a birthday — a date of some sort. Maybe we want to trigger an email to send out without us having to do it manually.

You could use a Task to do that. Tasks are great for emails. Again, reminders. Maybe you have customers that are logging into the system and you want to alert them of an update — you can certainly do that.

If you’re managing your projects and you’ve got a project deadline and you want to alert someone that has been assigned a task, “Hey, this task is due” — you could use a Task to do that. The task will run, look for some sort of matching criteria, and then take the action that you specify.

We could schedule it to run daily, weekly, or monthly. You can set when that next run date is. But once that’s all in place, you have several actions that you can take. So we’ve been discussing sending an email, but you can also update that record if you want to set a date to “expired” because a date appeared. You can update connected records.

You can also insert connected records as well. So lots of things you can do with Tasks. They’re available with our Pro Plan and above. You won’t see them during the trial, but while we’re going through this demo, you might see that and wonder what that feature is.

There’s more information on that in our knowledge base.

So that’s Tasks. As we continue to work our way down, you’ll see Pages. This is where we are building out our workflows.

Think — here we’re looking at our contact directory. We’re seeing a button here to add a new company. We’re seeing a table here or a grid view to allow us to view a list of all of our companies. We want to add links to be able to view more details about a company and all of their related contacts.

All of this magic happens here on the Pages side. This is where you set up those workflows.

Once those are set up, that becomes your live app — the one we saw earlier. So I’m going to actually exit out of this and just jump into this particular view or page.

Creating and Managing Pages

What we’re taking a look at here is a Page in Knack. Pages are added by clicking this plus button here. When you click a plus button, you’re given three options. You can add a public page, a login page, or a drop-down menu — which is just a way to group your pages under one single menu item. Those pages are your navigation.

Clicking this button here creates your navigation. If you remember when we looked at our live app, we had “Companies” and then we also had “Contacts.”

These two tabs — navigation items — refer to those same tabs in the live app, and they were created by clicking this option here.

Every link that goes underneath this — that’s cascading.

We saw the form to add a new company.

We had the page that links to our details — which we saw when we clicked on “View Company.”

And we went to our Details page where we were able to see, again, the high-level information about the company as well as the contacts tied to it.

Pardon my slow internet connection. Hopefully we don’t lose me today because I’ve had quite a few internet issues lately. So again, we’re able to see high-level information here. We can edit the company and see all of our contacts tied to the company.

So again, very high-level as we go through this, but these are views that are being added to the Page as well. But the Pages tab is where all the magic happens. This is how we set up and design our live app — and we’ll go through that after we run through this demo.

Settings and User Management

So this is our pages side. We’re adding views, more on that in a bit. Then we’ve got our settings options. This is where we can change and update the name of our app. We can change our URL. You’ll also see there’s some security settings. I’m not going to dive too deeply into that, but I do want to encourage you to explore.

Once you get into NAC, you will see that there’s a lot of settings and things. Just give yourself a bit of time, thirty minutes, to just say, okay, what’s here? Where are my settings at? What can I change?

What can I update? Don’t worry so much about building. Just get yourself familiar with the platform first. Give yourself that freedom to explore, and then, start diving in, start building out your application.

But this is where you’ll find, your settings, your app design, app settings, your live app settings, user login information. So this particular application was open to the public. You may want to place your application behind a login.

You further may want to limit who has access to what, and all of that happens or starts with the process of activating your users. So that will be something you’ll want to make sure you do if you wanna replace all of your information behind the login.

We also offer e commerce with our pro plan and above. You will be able to test that out during the trial, so you should have access to this.

Then if you are wanting to work with the APIs, if you are a developer working with a developer, you can work with our APIs. You can also include Javascript or CSS if you’re comfortable with code.

Then if you are looking to share your app with others, you can always embed your app on your website so you can create a quick snippet of code or you can share your Knack personalized URL which is just this link appear that you would copy and paste and share out.

So that’s kind of a high level overview. You’ll next see this area which is our data model, which is just going to allow you to see how do your tables interconnect.

You’ll be able to see each one of your tables and the relationships between each one of these tables. You can zoom in, you can move things around. It’s a great way to just see the beginning structures. It doesn’t show what your pages necessarily look like where you’re designing things, but definitely gives you an idea of the structure of your tables and the relationships between the two and what fields you have.

Alright. So pausing there, not seeing any any questions, which is completely fine. I always have plenty to talk about, so I’ll just keep keep going forward. We’re actually going to start building from scratch. So we’ll build this contact directory from scratch. So give me just a moment. We’ll get things set up here.

Building from Scratch

And, again, like I said, if you have some things that you want to make sure that we cover or you have questions, please feel free to share your use case.

Feel free to use the chat. You can send a private message to Max.

He can take a look at that, and and we can both discuss or discuss your ideas or what you would like to build, within your system.

So one moment.

We’re getting things set up here.

Okay. So if you are let me go ahead and make sure I’m sharing my screen. We’re back in the Knack dashboard.

Like I said, you can create new apps by selecting this option here. You may see options right on your dashboard, to allow you to start with a template app, or you can start from scratch. You can also click the create new app here, and you can start with a sample app here. You can start with AI. You can import your data or you can start from scratch. For the purposes of this demo, I’m going to start from scratch.

So while that’s getting set up, we’re gonna get redirected to our blank application.

Now by default, Knack will add a table for you. You’ll see that your app is named labeled untitled app three.

Creating a Company Table

There are all kinds of ways to update this information, and that’s what we’re going to to walk through now. So, we’re going to build out a directory for us to manage our companies and the contacts related to that company. So one of the first things we’re going to do is we’re going to build out a table that’s going to allow us to capture all of our company information.

So right now, we already have this table started for us. It’s labeled table one. We can actually update this, the settings here for this table. So we can click this drop down arrow. You’ll see that we have settings there.

I’d love to let everyone know to explore, but also when you see any of these little icons here, give yourself permission to explore what’s under there, what happens when I click this. I promise in the early stages, you’re not going to break anything. Feel free to break it, but then get used to it. Then once you start building your app, at least you have a better sense because you can always delete it and start all over again.

But yes, you can click on this drop down arrow here. This will get you to the settings.

Additionally, you’ll see you have that option there as well and it’ll get you to those settings. I’m just going to rename this as companies. Again, if you’re starting with a template app, this is how you would start to customize the template app to fit your needs.

But take note of some settings here. We’ve got this display field, We’ve got the sort order. This basically is setting your drop down options. So when we get into relationships and connecting data and looking up information on another table, it’s really important to to set that display field. It doesn’t make a lot of sense now, but in a moment it will, because we will we’ll dive into setting up relationships.

But, the sort order is just gonna set the sort for your drop downs. So if you’re looking at a list of companies and you want them to be in alphabetical order, you wanna make sure that the sort order is being set here.

So I’ve updated this for my companies. So we may want to start collecting other information related to the company. So we’ve got the company name.

Again, I’m gonna click add fields, and I can see all of my different field types here. So maybe I want to include a phone number tied to the company. Again, I can set this to required if I wanted, set it to unique. This description field is for internal purposes, so you know why you added that field. If you need some clarification, this is super user useful for, Knack builders and admins to know why you created the field sometimes.

You can set format for this as well as a default value.

So I’m gonna go ahead and add the phone field. Maybe we wanna capture an email address. And, again, I’m just simply clicking and adding this information. And, again, you have settings here. Don’t be afraid to click to see what your options are.

So we can continue to build this out, but it would just be any of the static information that you wanna track on the particular company, record here. So if there was an address that you needed to collect, if there was a website address that you needed to collect, just make sure that you are adding those fields within your application.

So again, think of this as your spreadsheet and the columns of your spreadsheet, or you’re building out the form to enter information to create a new company record.

So I’ll add a link to capture the website.

And, again, we can set the requirements there. We can even say with links. We can say use the the URL, we can say use the same text and say website. So then that way we don’t see the URL, all we see is the link text website. We can even check the box to open it up in a new window.

So again, all of these fields different field types are going to have their own settings, so don’t be afraid to dive in there to see what’s available.

So now we’ve got our company table set up. I’m going to navigate back to my data tab and start thinking about some of the other things that we want to collect.

Chapter

Establishing Contact Details

We know we want contacts related to a company, so we need to create another table to collect all of our contact details.

So I’m going to add a new table and I’m going to just start from scratch or I could start with a premade table.

We have an actual contacts table captured here, so I can check that box and say create that table for me.

And now you can see that I’ve got, my contact table added here as well. Now I may not need all of the fields, so I’m safe to come in here and say no I’m not going to collect the birthday. But again, if we wanted to so we could use a task to trigger a message to say happy birthday on your day, we could certainly do that. But we can continue to go through here and update those as we want. And as you can see, those options were here to delete that.

So now we’ve got our contact table created.

How do we tie that contact to the company?

Some are used to in maybe traditional databases using an ID. You might have a primary key and a foreign key depending upon what table it is. So maybe in our contact table, we have a primary ID, and then we want to come here and we wanna say, let’s get a foreign key to tie it back to my my company table.

How we do this in Knack is with our connection feature. So our connection feature is acting somewhat like that foreign key that says, hey. We want to tie this back to that parent table. So you’ll see a couple options for the connections. You can add here quickly.

You can also find that in your field settings down here at the bottom.

I like the quick link there, so I can say, let me connect my contacts to my company.

So I’m going to select my company table, and that’s going to ask you about this relationship. We’re going to say each contact connects with one company, each company connects with many contacts. This is your one to many.

If this feels like it’s not reading true and and you find yourself doing something like this where you’re making it true that way, more than likely your connection is in the wrong table. If you find yourself doing that, exit out of this and jump into your other table. And that’s where you’re going to place your connection field, if you’re new to connections and setting up relationships.

Oops. Nine times out of ten too, this is the the best configuration for you. However, there are definitely instances where you need many to many or a one to one. One to one is very rare. Those, I would say, is for experts only, but many to many, you may need that. The rule of thumb is with whether it’s a many to many or one to one, just place that connection in the table where you’re going to be making that update the most.

If you’re going to be always editing your contact table and you’re going to be adding them to company different companies, then you’ll want to set that many to many up in that table.

So anyhow, one to many though, ninety nine, I like to say, percent of the time. That’s all you need. So I’m going to add this connection to my contact table, and this is going to allow me to tie a contact to a company. So that’s that’s it. That’s the simple straightforward way to connect our tables. That’s all you need. You don’t need to come back into your company table and set a connection up here.

That is all handled on the pages side where we unlock a lot of functionality and features over there just by having that one connection in place.

Some other things to talk about before we move on to designing our app and adding some test data to our application.

User Roles and Permissions

Roles user roles. You’ll see this option here enable users. So I touched a little bit upon that while we were going through the demo of our contact directory, our other contact directory, but I want to talk a little bit more about user roles. User roles are important especially if you need users to log into your application. So it’s something you definitely want to kind of have fleshed out before you actually start building out your pages of your application.

And why do I say this? Because a lot of times when you start to build out your pages, you want to limit. You want to give certain people access, but other people you don’t. You want to give maybe potentially your sales reps, if you’re building out a CRM where you’re assigning contacts to sales reps or companies to sales reps.

You want your sales reps to log in and only see their cell their customers, their contacts that they’ve been assigned to. Or maybe, you’re building out something for project management and you want your employees to log in and only see tasks that they have been assigned to. So the way that we manage that in NAC is through one piece, which is having user roles enabled, being able to know who is logged in. So they we need to create user roles.

Then the other piece is the connections piece and tying them to the data.

So in our demo that we just went through, we didn’t have a user group specifically logged in, but let’s say we did. We did want to create a group of admins so admins can log in and see everything, and we wanted to create a group of sales reps to allow sales reps to log in and look at their contacts that they have been assigned to. So how would you build something like that out within Knack? One of the first steps is going to be enabling our user roles.

Again, the rule of thumb, if the user by chance needs to log in, best practice, create them as a user role. Even if you don’t plan to give them access, upfront, if there is a chance that you might, go ahead and create that table as a user role table versus as a general table. I’m going to jump in here and I’m going to create a couple user roles. First one being admins for myself and then maybe I want to create another role for sales reps or team logging in needing to access their contacts.

And that’s it. Once I’m done, I am going to add that and you will see two new tables added Knack. Actually, three tables. We have an accounts table which just refers to all of the accounts and then we have got two different user roles created: our admins and our sales reps.

And you’ll notice, we’ve got some default fields here that can’t be removed. They’re required for these tables to exist, but they’re in the name field, email field, the password field, the status of that particular record, meaning does that user have access, are they active, are they inactive, are they pending approval.

So all of these statuses will definitely play a role in the pages that they have access to. So if they’re inactive or pending approval, they won’t be able to see anything until they are set to active.

So a lot of controls here within the user roles based on these fields, but these are default fields that get added. But at this point, you can now start to build out and add what you normally would to a regular table up above. You can continue to build things out. So if you wanted to capture the hire date of your sales rep or if you wanted to grab some additional information like address or phone number, you can certainly continue to build out these tables like you normally would to capture the information the static information about your sales rep.

Adding Test Data

So these are similar to tables, but they also serve as a separate function in terms of how we set up permissions with our pages.

So we’ve got our companies table. We’ve got our contacts, we’ve got our admins, we’ve got our sales reps.

One other connection that we might want to make, again, we were talking about letting a sales rep log in and viewing the contacts that they have been assigned to, the leads that they’ve been assigned to. So how would we do that within NAC? Again, if each sales rep can be connected with many contacts, this is where we would go into our company or contacts table, and this is where we would assign that connection field. This is where we would place the foreign key, so to speak.

So I’m going to go ahead and add a connection. I’m going to choose my sales rep. Again, I’m going to read this statement, Each contact connects with only one sales rep. Each sales rep can connect with many, many contacts.

That’s right. So I’m going to go ahead and add that connection.

We’ve got some structure set up here within our application.

One of the other things that I like to do at the very beginning as I’m building out my application is to start to add test data.

So one of the things that you’ll want to do is jump into your records. You can import data for sure.

It’s up to you on what makes the most sense. You can either import the information at the end of your build once you’ve kinda got everything structured and set up the way you want, or you can start with test data in the very or you can import your data at the very beginning. Just word of caution as you’re learning and building, you might go, oh, you know what? I don’t want this occupation field here. I want to capture it somewhere else. So then you may end up having to reimport your data again. So sometimes waiting until you’ve got everything the way you want, then you can match your spreadsheets to your Knack application in the process.

So something to think about. I like to just do test data, specifically when it comes to my user roles.

So jumping into my accounts here, I’m going to go ahead and add some user roles to my or some records to my user roles. Reason being, when I log into my live app to test it out, I want to make sure I have those set up ahead of time because those login credentials will not relate to your login credentials to this builder environment, but your login credentials will relate to the records that are in these tables. So I’m going to jump over to records and I’m gonna do, let’s see. I think I’m on the admin table. So, Max, you’re gonna be admin.

Yes.

And then I am gonna put myself in as sales rep.

Keep it as simple as possible for the testing because we only have test data in here. So, we can do random number there.

Now we’ve got some test data in, at least at the very minimum, our user roles to allow us to log in and test out our application.

Again, I can come in here if I wanted to and add some company information.

We can add, numbers if we wanted to.

Entirely up to you if you’re if you’re wanting to see things right away.

Let’s see what we can do to be consistent.

Alrighty. And notice how my URL shows website there, and that was a setting that I set up under, my field option here.

So, again, that customization, be sure to take a look at these settings here to see what’s available.

Alright. And if I wanted to add it add a new contact here, we will add a new record, We will do, let’s see, no images.

Again, I’m just adding test data so we have some information.

I’m going to assign this to my one sales rep row myself.

Again, notice how this is a lookup field. This is looking up my contacts or my it’s looking up on my sales rep table, so I can see my sales rep That’s tied to my sales rep here. It’s pointing to that display field that we can set up in our table settings, which is that first name. And then you’ll also see my one company for Acme there as well.

So I’m going to go ahead and hit submit. Now we’ve got some some general data added to the system.

We’ve already talked about tasks. I’m going to just jump right down to pages.

Once you’ve built your you’ve you’ve set up your data, you’ve added some test data, you’ve got your user roles set up in there.

Once you’ve enabled your user roles, we add a home page by default.

This home page is blank. There is nothing on it. If I were to click my Go to Live app, this is going to take me to the home page of my app. It’s blank. There’s nothing on here. I haven’t even had a chance to update my name yet, so this is what you’ll see.

This URL that’s up here, I don’t know how well you guys can see that, but we’ve got portions to our URL. You see row, that is my account name, then you have Knack dot com. Then you have untitledapp6, which is referencing the URL portion of the name of my app, and I can update that. Then the hashtag home, anything after that hash is going to refer to the page that you’re on within your application.

Again, the row portion of it is my actual account name, and I can set that up under my in on my account dashboard. But then everything after that, after the let me go back to my live app. After the Knack dot com refers to the name of your app, then everything after the hash refers to the page that you’re on.

Customizing Application Settings

So some things to think about.

You do have some customization over the information here, and I’ll show you guys where that’s at.

If you wanted to, before we start building out things, if you’re saying, okay. This is starting to work. Let me start to customize this. I can click on this option here. I can jump to my app settings. And, again, this is where you’ll see that untitled app three.

I can say call this my CRM demo. Let’s see. We’ll call it webinar demo. Then we can do the same thing here. We can do CRM.

And now my, information will update here, and I can drop in additional information here, the email address, what time zone I’m in. So there’s some settings here. But as soon as I save that, my, whole, instance will refresh here. And now you can if if you can see this, you’ll see my URL has updated. And if I click on that link to view my app, you see my name has changed up here. And even up here, my URL has has also updated. And, again, we’re on the home page.

So anytime you make updates on in your application and your environment, hit that refresh.

If you still have this open, you’ll wanna refresh the page, or you can open up a new link to to refresh so you can see the the changes.

Understanding Public Pages and Views

So jumping back to pages, we’re on our home page. This is a very public page, so anything that we add here is going to be public.

How do you add views to this page or how do you add data to this page? We discussed this a little bit earlier, but these are called views. I can click the add view here or add view here. We’ve got a variety of view types. Again, views are ways to display your data or to add and update data in your database.

So you’ll see we have form views, we have grid views, search, list, lots of different options here, static views, rich text. I can add a rich text view and just say a big welcome message.

I can even do some formatting to set that to a specific header. And if I go to my live app, again, here’s my nonrefreshed instance, but here’s it refreshed. Now I can see my welcome message. So, again, we could just continue to add views to the page to build things out.

Again, this is a public page. You may you may not want any of your information to be public, so then we’ll start talking about what’s the next step. How do you go about building out your application? How do you go about thinking about it as it relates to how you build a Knack?

Creating a Secure Login Page

Let’s say we want to put now behind the database or behind a login. We want a way for our sales reps to be able to log in and see the contacts that they have been assigned to.

So how do we manage that within NAC?

We’re going to first start with creating a new page and instead of creating a public page, we’re going to create a login page. Once we create this login page, we have a widget that’s going to kind of walk you through building out that page and the information or who has access to the page. So that’s the first start, limiting permissions. We can give permissions to everybody. That means it doesn’t matter who’s logged in, whether it’s your admins or your sales rep, everybody’s going to be able to see the same thing.

Or we can limit it further and say, you know what, I just want to build a portal for my reps to be able to log in and just view their Knack, and that’s it. That’s what I want them to do as part of their workflow. So the first step will be setting up who has access to this page that we’re building out. I’m going to click continue and I’m just going to call this my sales rep dashboard.

So now that I’ve added that, this page is now blank. If I were to click to view my live app, I’m hit with a login page. So taking a step back before we dive into this, we have our home page that was public. We now have our login page here with a lock that says this is locked and it’s only for my sales reps logging in. Once they’ve logged in, we now have this blank page. So if you remember, I created some credentials ahead of time for my sales rep.

So I’m going to log in with those credentials.

Now you see my navigation here at the top, my home page, my sales rep dashboard, my home page with the welcome, the dashboard here, and there’s nothing on this particular page.

As we see here, there’s nothing here. Now we’ve got to start thinking about what do we want our sales reps to do.

Displaying Contacts for Sales Reps

Again, we’ve already talked about we want them to be able to log in and view all of the contacts that they’re associated with. So I’ll choose a grid view. I could definitely do a list view. There’s definitely other options. I could do a search view, but the grid view for me makes the most sense to be able to show all of the contacts that they’ve been assigned.

So I’m going to choose my contact table because that’s what I want them to see. You’ll see in our widget wizard here on the left hand side, I can show my logged in sales rep all the contacts or I can just limit it because now NAP knows who has access to this page, and they could start to you can start to filter that information out and only show them information that they’re tied to. So now we can say, alright, my contacts that are connected to the logged in sales reps. That’s all they should see.

So I’m going to go ahead and click continue. We can give them edit access or we cannot give them edit access. It’s entirely up to you. You can add this at this step.

You can remove it at the next step, but this is where you start to control what it is that they can see and do.

So now we can quickly add that.

We can also add a link to view more details related to that contact.

Once we click continue, this will help us to complete the wizard to make sure everything’s named correctly.

Now we’ve got a new grid that’s going to show our contacts.

You’ll notice that this grid is selected and everything is grayed out below. That just means we’re able to see our settings here to further customize this grid.

We could do some filtering if we wanted to. We could say, let’s filter out anyone that doesn’t have a sales company attached to them. So the company is blank. We can filter out those records.

That may not be good use case for here, or maybe we want to filter out where the name is blank, or if you have a status, the lead is not new, or the lead is canceled, right, then maybe you maybe you don’t wanna show that in this particular view. You just need to make sure you’re using you have a field that’s capturing that, and you can filter out that information.

The source is also gonna tell you what this grid is doing, which is showing contact records connected to the logged in sales rep.

Then again, we can jump down through here. You’ll see you’ve got additional settings. I can enable keyword searching. I can turn on record exporting, and I can also do inline editing if I wanted to turn this into an Knack or a Google Sheet where I can click in to edit these individual records.

There’s lots of settings here. As you see, I’m scrolling down. You can do summaries if you’re capturing numbers. I’m not going to dive too much more deeply into this, but I this is where I encourage you really to explore and dive into these settings here.

So I’m going to click save, and now you’ll notice my sitemap here is starting to take shape. We log we have our login.

We have our table that’s gonna show all of the contacts connected to our logged in sales rep. We now have a form that allows them to edit that sales, edit that contact, and then we have another page to allow us to see details about that contact.

So let’s take a look at what this looks like. Again, if I navigate here, this page is blank, so it’s gonna require a refresh.

So now we can see, oh, here’s the one contact.

I can click into here and make changes if I need to on the fly.

I can add notes. I can also click into a link that gives me a form that allows me to add additional information.

I could type today.

I can also click on a link to view more details about this particular contact.

Now all of these views can be edited further. You just need to navigate to each one of these views to customize.

Again, on our grid view, if there are particular fields that I don’t want to show, I can definitely remove those fields from the view. I can change my headers to labels. I can change the text that is there.

I can add icons.

Again, there’s lots of settings here.

You can also jump into your connected tables. Let’s say on my contact table, I wanted to pull some information from my company table over, like the company website. I can just click on that. You can see that gets dropped in there, as well. And, I have my action links. So if I didn’t add the edit link earlier, I can come back in here and add the edit link now. I can even give them a way to delete this information if need be.

Advanced Customization Options

So lots of options here for customizing each one of these views even further. Again, your edit form, you have the same options here. Clicking on it opens up your wizard on the left hand side.

By hovering over each one of these field options here, you can add instructions.

You can set it to read only if this is an edit form. So Knack, controlling what your users can can see and do.

Alright, now I am going to take a look. It looks like we had a couple questions. I’m going to see if there’s an opportunity for me to demo any of these. But if you have any additional questions, now’s a good time to throw those here into the chat or the Q and A.

So let’s see. I see a question. Can you add additional features like hire date, address, later, or must it be done during the initial creation?

It looks like Max was able to answer your question there.

Yes, and hopefully you were able to see that, but that’s a great question.

Yes, you can continue to add to your tables even after they’ve been created.

Just a word of something to make note of. Even though we’ve already started building out our pages, let’s say you were to add some new fields here. Let’s say we wanted to add a paragraph text that’s going to capture notes on the company and we have that added here. We will need to go in to our views here to update that that information. So let’s say on our home page, we wanted to add a view here, and I probably did this in reverse order. But if we were looking at our companies here, while we are adding this information here, we click continue and we add the grid.

For example, if notes wasn’t added, we would we would see this here. We would just see our list of companies, and, we wouldn’t see notes. We would need to come in here and add that new column that was that was added. But, just a word of caution, not even so much caution because it’s going to happen, and which is the beauty of Knack is being able to customize your app on the fly and quickly update.

So if you, down the road, say, you know what? I wish we were capturing this information. You know now know you can come into NAC quickly and say, hey. Let’s capture a new field to capture their logo.

Maybe we want to grab our image and grab the logo for the company.

We want to make sure it’s resized. Maybe we want to do some thumbnail options, But you can do that and then you can just jump right over into your pages and say, okay, let me add that new logo now. You’ll see I have my logo and then I’ve got the resized version of the logo. You can even create a thumbnail version within Knack.

So, hopefully, that answers your question in terms of being able to add additional features. Yep. You certainly can customize it as you see fit with the fields that you need.

Taking a look at the next question.

Let’s see.

You’re collecting some sensitive information. We allow the team to have access, but if we expand the features in our app, yes, you can definitely lock things down further.

One thing that I’ve seen over the years, so again, taking a look at our pages, we’ve locked this page down for our sales reps.

Again, we can hide and show the fields. Maybe you don’t want to give them access to the email or the phone number or the website.

As long as you’re building out a page for that group, you can hide information for that group to keep them from seeing that particular field. So you can really customize what it is that they can see and do within NAC.

We have this edit link here. Maybe you don’t want your sales reps or maybe your sales reps all have access to this page here. Let’s even go a step further. We could give access to our admins as well, which in general you would not be able to see.

We’d have to kind of set this up. Actually, I’m not even going to take you through that example because that’s not a great example, but you can continue to lock down pages further. What do I mean by that? Let’s say you do create a high level overview that gives permissions to all of your users where you have a way to see all of your companies within the system here.

We’re going to give a grid for admins to view all the companies and we create that edit link there. We can say add the grid.

Now we can see all of our companies and this is for all of our logged in users now at this point. But we can say, okay, both our sales reps and our admins can see all of the companies.

If I jump into my live app here, I’m able to see all the companies here. My logged in sales rep can also edit the company. Maybe we don’t want to give them access to edit this link. You even have options to lock this down further. You can say, you know what, let’s re require login for that page and just make it for my admins.

Now we’ve locked it down even further within Knack. If I jump back into here, my logged in sales rep can still see the link here, but if they click on it, they’ll be met with a login. So lots of ways to continue to log and lock your data down just depending upon who your user roles, the permissions that you have set up.

So hopefully that additional information is super helpful.

It looks like we might have one more question here.

Building a Notes Table for Client Interactions

So organize running notes, for instance, how to document phone calls, tasks, interactions for a specific client over time. That’s a a a great question. So, let’s see. We’ve got less than a minute here.

I can show you quickly how you would build something like that out. So, one of those things that you might want to do is think in terms of one to many.

So if you’ve got, like, a rep that has many contacts that they’re associated with or Knack that where you have many notes that you need to keep track of, you’ll probably want to do something like this where you create a brand new table that allows you to collect notes that capture a date, who left the note potentially.

And we’ll just start with a blank table.

And I’m just gonna rename this to notes.

And then we can do some things like let’s, this will be the comment or the note.

We will also capture a date.

Scroll down here. When that note was captured.

We can also capture who made that comment.

We can tie it to our accounts. We can tie it to our, sales reps.

We’ll do this with our sales reps. And, again, each note connects with one sales rep. Each sales rep connects with many notes, so we can add that. And then the other piece is we wanna tie this to a contact. So if they’re in contact with the if they’re working with a contact and they’re tracking notes over time, then we want to make sure that each note gets tied to a contact. So each note connects with one contact. Each contact can connect with many notes.

Connecting Notes to Sales Reps and Contacts

And again, this is just one way from the sales rep angle. But once we’ve got that new table set up, it becomes really straightforward for our sales reps to then manage that history. Right? So we created a details page for contacts.

So now we can say, let’s add a view that’s gonna allow us to show a grid of all the notes, related to this page’s contact. So now we can see the notes and we’ll be able to see that history of those notes.

We’ll click continue and now we’ve got that set up. We’ve got a time stamp. We’ve got who left the the note and the comment related to it. That’s just the view, but you need to obviously give yourself a way to add that note. So you can now say, hey, let’s add a note connected to this page’s contact.

We’ll click continue. We can link to that from a menu button. And this I’m going through this super fast, and we’re two minutes over, so I appreciate you hanging out, for this, but we can add that note.

And that’s it. We’ve got that that structure pretty much set up. There’s some definitely some automations, and with views, you can move them around. But there’s some things we could do to automate this further.

We can capture the date time already.

We don’t need to do that. We know who our logged in sales rep is, so we can set that automatically, and we know what contact we’re we’re capturing that with because our source is telling us this is inserting a note connected to the contact. Perfect.

Automating Note Capture

The one other step that we might need to do is, add a a record rule, which I didn’t get a chance to dive into this. But feel free to reach out to the onboarding team after the call here, and and we can definitely jump on a call with you and and and go through this information further. 

But one of the things you would want to do is say, hey. Set the sales rep to my logged in sales rep. So we know who’s logged in. We can now automatically set that, and it makes it super easy for you now to capture notes related to a particular contact or sales rep. So if I go to my live app again, we should now see this new functionality that’s been added to our sales rep workflow.

Right? So now we can view our contact Steve. We have no notes, but now we can jump in here. We can add a note.

Once we add it, we can go back and we’ll see the note now added to the table with that timestamp and who shared that information.

Hopefully that was super helpful. This video will be available to you after the webinar, so definitely, hopefully you’ll be able to feel free to slow it down and to go back through there to see what pieces that you need to make sure that you have.

Webinar Wrap-Up and Future Engagement

Other than that, I I’m gonna be mindful of the time. I appreciate you joining us today. And, again, we apologize, for the miscommunication earlier.

Hopefully, if you have additional questions, feel free to join us next week. We’ll be having more webinars around specific topics.

Also, feel free to reach out to our onboarding team here. Again, we are available to you Monday through Friday, eight AM to eight PM, Eastern Standard Time. You can also reach out to us at onboarding at Knack dot com.

Alright. With that said, thanks again for joining us. Everyone have a wonderful rest of your day. Bye, everyone.