Activities in CRM Core are a record of interaction with a contact. Conceptually, they are meant to record the interaction between people, and store information someone would need to understand the nature of that interaction.
Activities are always stored along with a specific contact. This page will go into that relationship and how it is managed in CRM Core. If you are following along with the steps of this handbook, you should be viewing a contact record. If not, create one, and go to the contact detail page.
At the top of the page, you will notice tabs for activities and relationships. Click the link for activities. This will take you to the activities screen for the selected contact.
The activities screen is a view. It contains a filter for viewing activities by type, along with a listing of all activities stored for the given contact. It also contains a link allowing users to add new activities for the selected contact.
At first, this screen will appear with no activities listed - none have been created yet! Site builders will note this screen is a view, and that they can alter the appearance and functionality of the screen through a web-based administrative interface.
The next step is to create an activity for the selected contact. Click the link to add an activity that appears under the tabs. On the resulting page, you will be presented with a list of activity types to select from. CRM Core ships with several preconfigured activity types, and provides an administrative interface for managing them. You can delete the preconfigured activity types, add new fields to them, and create new activity types through the administration screens.
For now, let's focus on creating a new activity. Click on the link for the Meeting from the list and you will be presented with a screen for storing the details of a meeting with the selected contact.
On the resulting screen, you will notice some standard fields that appear as part of all activity types:
- A title, which is used to store the title of the meeting. Every activity must have a title, even though this may seem repetitive. If this becomes a problem, you can configure a default value for this field using the administrative interface for CRM Core.
- A participants field, which records who participated in the activity. You will notice the name of the selected contact appears in this field. Meetings will typically include more than one person, and you can add additional participants by separating names with a comma.
- A date field, used to capture when the activity occurred. This field captures the time and date for the activity. If you only want to record dates, this field can be configured in the CRM Core administrative interface.
- A notes field, which is used to capture information about the activity. Notes is a standard column set up by default for all activity types.
The specific list of fields appearing on this screen can be modified within the administrative interface. This means you can add any fields you need to capture information related to any activity stored in CRM Core.
For now, let's just create an activity and look at the way the system works. Enter a title for the activity, along with some sample text in the notes field, and press the 'Save Activity' button. This will take you to a page for viewing the activity, which displays all of the fields included in the activity. You will notice the names of all participants are presented as links, allowing you to easily navigate back to contact records.