A lot of people ask me about using Tag Cloud in vtiger. It’s really pretty simple. The first thing that you do is assign keywords as you’re going through records in Vtiger. So for example, if you’re going to be doing a seminar in the future, as you come across organizations or contacts or leads that you want to invite, you ‘tag’ them. Using the tag cloud widget on the bottom left of any detail screen, you type in the word ‘seminar’. So as you are going through your day for over the course of days, weeks, or months, you accumulate more and more records that have the key word ‘seminar’ in the tag cloud.
Then you can open up the homepage and activate the tag cloud widget and that will show you all the keywords that you’ve entered on various records in the system. You can click on any key word and it will open up and show you a search list view of all the records that you have applied that keyword to in the tag cloud.
Personally I don’t think it’s as helpful as as many people might think. I am a big believer that you’re better off taking a disciplined approach to finding things in vtiger by using good well thought-out fields in the database — especially your status fields your type fields etc. Use good pick list fields so that at a later date you can easily find things using filters. I believe it’s the best way to approach things for a database. If you use tag cloud, every one can use different key words and you may have typos in your key words, etc — so it is an undisciplined approach to managing search in the database. I can provide a flexible ‘filtering’ option for an individual who can’t accomplish what he/she wants with in the context of a large organization’s database where it is not possible to satisfy everyone’s needs.
