6. Activities

Activities are the lifeblood of any CRM system and are each assigned an owner who is responsible for completing the activity according to the best practises of your organisation. Entities (including custom entities) can some or all of the following activities associated with them:

· Task.

· Fax.

· Email.

· Letter.

· Phone Call.

· Appointment.

· Service Activity (see the service chapter).

· Campaign Response (see the marketing chapter).

Activities can be viewed from the Workplace-Activities View or from the Activities pane against each Entity. Each activity is owned either by a user or a queue who undertakes responsibility for completion of the task. Once an activity has been completed it is made available from the History pane against each related entity.

Note: The type of ownership is defined when creating custom entities and only user-owned entities can have associated activities.

The following fields are present on all activities:

· Owner.

· Subject. A short one line description.

· Description.

· Regarding. The entity record that the activity relates to which could be any core CRM entity or user-owned custom entity.

· Scheduled Start (the due field).

· Duration.

· Priority.

· Category and Sub-Category for your own text categorisations.

The following fields are also maintained in addition to those on the default form:

· Actual Start (automatically filled in on completion).

· State. The state of the activity entity usually open, or completed.

· Status. A breakdown status relating to each state.

Activities can also be assigned to Queues which are set up for Users to browse and accept activities that they take responsibility for. New activities created from incoming email or from marketing activities might be assigned to a queue which is available to a collection of users one of whom will eventually accept any activities that they undertake responsibility for.

Queues are an integral part managing workflow and are discussed in the services chapter. Assigning ownership of an activity to a user will add the activity to the Assigned Queue so the user can view newly assigned activities, select them and click the Accept button to take on ownership of the activity.

Most of the core CRM entities and custom entities that allow user ownership have activities and notes attached to them. New activities can be created for an entity in several ways:

· From the Action-Add Activity menu,

· Selecting New when looking at the Activities pane for the entity.

· Using the follow up button from the form toolbar (shown below) or selecting the drop-down in the form assistant.

· Selecting the Workplace.Activities pane and adding a new activity.

Note: Users may be read-only or administrative users with restricted access to CRM. Administrative users will not be able to see their activities and will need to be notified by email of their tasks.

6.1. Tasks

Tasks are the catch-all activity type used to schedule and manage workflow activities.

6.2. Fax

The fax activity does not seem to be integrated with the Microsoft fax solutions. Ideally the incoming fax should recognise the telephone number and create a fax activity (with the attached fax document) against the appropriate Lead, Contact, or Account. Currently this needs to be done manually or programmatically.

6.3. Phone Call

Phone call records are used for scheduling outbound phone calls and recording notes for inbound calls. Some telephony applications automatically create phone call records for inbound calls.

Phone calls and faxes have additional activity fields:

· The direction of the call (incoming or outgoing).

· The sender or recipient.

· Phone or Fax number.

· Fax Cover.

Note: TAPI dialling is possible with the Outlook client but not currently with the web interface for CRM and incoming call solutions are currently available from a limited number of telephony vendors (including Cisco and Avaya). The author has a solution for telephony at http://www.redware.com/mscrm.

6.4. Letter

Letters can be created in several ways:

· Using the Tools-Mail Merge option within the Contacts view in Outlook (see the next section).

· Pressing the Mail Merge button available the View toolbar (for selected entities) to control a mail merge to Word 2007 using a blank document or templates stored within CRM.

· Exporting data from CRM either as an Excel spreadsheet or as a report sent to a CSV file and creating a mail merge outside of the CRM application.

· Creating mail merge from a Campaign Activity for a marketing campaign.

However, the corresponding letter activity is not always created automatically (or the document not attached) and the letter must be created manually and the document used for the letter attached from the notes tab.

6.5. Email

Emails are sent out from the CRM web interface using either SMTP or Exchange (the former are not automatically copied into the Outlook folders). Emails can be typed in with simple formatting or created from an email template or knowledge base article (described in the Services chapter).

6.6. Email Templates

Email Templates can be configured system wide or by each user as a quick productivity aide. Personal Email Templates are created from the Workplace-Personalize Workspace option in CRM or the CRM-Options menu in the Outlook client.

You may type text with simple formatting using the toolbar in the edit space or open an html page in Internet Explorer and select the contents to paste into the page for sophisticated layouts.

Be careful to design your html to use images that are available at an internet location so the recipient will be able to access them as images are not stored or transmitted along with the email. Note also that some email clients block images and show only the plain html by default.

You can insert dynamic values from the database for the associated CRM entity data into the email. User field values are always available for you to design a signature for each email showing the user name and telephone number for example. Select the Insert/Update button at the top of the page to insert the required data field with an optional value to show if the data field is blank. The entities available will depend on the base entity selected when you create the template.

Note: It does not seem possible to define attachments for a template which need to be added each time.

Specifying style information is difficult using the user interface because it is not possible to edit the html header information to define a style or add a style sheet. Consequently you must control the style information using the formatting buttons or with inline styles.

The easy way to create sophisticated templates is to create the web page with inline styles and save and open the file in Internet Explorer for pasting into the template. The inline styles will be preserved when you paste and the underlying code for an inline style looks like this:

<p style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:12px">Thank you for taking the time to talk with me about our software add-ons for Microsoft CRM 3.0. We currently offer the following functionality: </p>

6.7. Appointment

Appointments are more complex activities that allow several Resources to be booked. The example below shows a meeting booked for a contact and a user with an optional extra User attending. The resources that can be booked for a meeting (ether required or optional) comprise:

· User.

· Lead, Contact or Account.

· Equipment and Resources (for example a meeting room or a projector).

Appointments are recorded in the calendar available from the Workplace-Calendar area and the Service-Calendar views as well as within the Exchange Calendar in Outlook once the activity has been synchronised.

6.8. Service Activity

Service activities are similar to appointments but allow equipment or a package of required resources to be defined and automatically scheduled when available (see the services chapter).

6.9. Campaign Response

Campaign Response activities are used to monitor the success of marketing campaigns (see the marketing chapter).