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Contact to Contact Relationships

I would be nice to have a contact to contact relationship object, similar to the partners object on accounts. With services like Linked In, etc tracking personal relationships it would be nice to track this at a high level in salesforce.com.com. Some use cases include:
- tracking who worked for who in the past
- contacts related to attorneys
- family members related to each other
- Referrals

I'm sure there are plenty more use cases. Please add them in the contacts section if you think this is a good idea.

ToddJanzen 10/19/06	I meant comments section.
RobinPruitt 10/27/06	I completely agree. It would also be useful to create a six degrees of seperation type report that shows who I know who might know someone else at a target company. My link to future business perhaps.
TimAlsop 11/06/06	If somebody moves companies, then it would be important to track the old company the person worked for as well as the new company/account. The best way to do this is mark their contact record as 'old' and make sure tha tthis is visually clear (e.g. different colour). Then, any contact<->contact relationship can apply to old contact details as well as with the latest details of the contact (e.g. whom they currently work for). Effectively, I am trying to say that the relationship should not be with the actual contact, but with the contact and the company they were associated with when the relationship was formed. This way, it would be easier to look at a contact, from this contact find the account they currently work for, then trace their employment history backwards, looking at people who they used to work with (and had relationships with) when at previous employeers.
jcoppedge Jun 11	Why wouldn't you just create a custom object called "Contact Relationship" and link that to account or contact? Then set field tracking on Contacts for Account. Contact --> Contact to Account Relationship --> Account Contains details of previous position Contact --> Contact to Contact Relationship --> Contact How do they know each other? etc.- set those fields to populate on the related list under the page view, and you've accomplished this.
TimAlsop Jun 11	yes, that is a good idea. However, sometimes other details held about the contact when they worked for their previous employer are also useful. It is better if we can just keep the old contact record and mark it as "this person does not work here anymore" and then create a new contact record for same person, and associate the new contact with the old contact. Sometimes a person leaves a company, and we don't know who they work for until they re-appear at another employer. In this case we need a way to mark the contact as "doesn't work here anymore". I agre that this can be done with a lot of customisation, but if SFDC is being sold as a contact management application, why isn't this functionality already included in the base product ? I am sure if SFDC implemented this it would be much better than if it was done with custom objects.

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