Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM 4 For Dummies®

Chapter 14. Creating and Managing Activities

Microsoft CRM 4 comes with a basic activity management system that enables you to schedule or log activities associated with the various records in the database, such as opportunities, leads, contacts, accounts, or cases.

Your calendar is a subset of your activities and displays only appointments. Your activities show a wider assortment of things that take up your time, such as phone calls and miscellaneous tasks such as meeting with your boss or coordinating the company golf outing. In addition, only the appointments on your calendar are coordinated with Outlook. Phone calls and tasks never show up in the main area of Outlook.

Aside from the obvious practice of entering all your activities in the system to ensure that they're properly documented and that you don't forget to do them, workflow rules can also have an important role with activities in your business processes. Workflow rules can look for overdue activities and alert you to them. They can look for activities that should be scheduled (such as following up on a quote that you sent out a week ago or an annual maintenance contract that's due next month) and send a series of alerts to the right team members. This is a powerful use of scheduling, but it works well only if everyone on the team is consistently logging his or her activities. (We discuss workflow in detail in Chapter 9.)

The ingredients essential to activity management include viewing existing activities, entering new ...