Salesforce.com® For Dummies®

Chapter 6. Managing Activities

In This Chapter

• Looking into Salesforce activities

• Making new activities

• Managing activities

• Changing activities

Activities in Salesforce are scheduled calendar events and tasks. In many ways, Salesforce's events and tasks are just like the activities you use in Microsoft Outlook. You can schedule events on your calendar, invite people to meetings, book a conference room, and add tasks to your to-do lists so that you don't forget to get things done.

Tip

You can synchronize Salesforce with Outlook so that you don't have to input activities twice. (See Chapter 3 to install and configure Salesforce's Outlook synchronization plug-in.)

However, Salesforce takes activities further: You can easily link events and tasks to other related records, such as accounts, contacts, and so on. So you can view activities both in the context of a relevant item (for example, all activities that relate to an account), and as a standalone from your calendar and task lists in the comfort and convenience of your home page. And, if you're a manager, Salesforce allows you to stay up to speed on your users and how they're spending their time.

By managing activities in Salesforce, you can better coordinate with your team, quickly assess what's going on in your accounts, and focus on the next steps to close deals or solve issues.

In this chapter, we first show you how to schedule events and create tasks. Then, we cover how to find and view activities, both from your home page and from specific ...