You can track to-dos and other follow-up activities as tasks in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, much as you can in Outlook. When you create an activity in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, you can use the Regarding field to specify a customer or other record to which the activity is associated. When you enter a value in the Regarding field, you create a link between the activity and the selected record so that the activity is displayed from the specified record. Using the Regarding field provides additional data about your activities, and this data might help your organization better understand how employees spend their time in addition to categorizing the various customer interactions.
By default, you can set an activity to be regarding any of the following records:
Account
Campaign Activity
Case
Contact
Contract
Invoice
Lead
Opportunity
Order
Quick Campaign
Quote
Tip
You might be able to track activities and notes to other record types if your system administrator has configured custom entities in your Microsoft Dynamics CRM environment.
By properly setting the Regarding field for activity records, you can more easily look up and reference customer information. For example, if you set all of your tasks so they are regarding an account record, it would be cumbersome to find a particular task if you have several hundred activities for that account record. However, if you set activities so they are regarding certain records related to the account (such as quotes or cases), you can find all of the activities related to those other entities without having to sort through hundreds of activities.
Tip
It is a best practice to use the Regarding field to link activities to records in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
In this exercise, you will create a task regarding the Sonoma Partners account created in the previous chapter and then mark it as Completed.
Note
USE the Sonoma Partners account record you created in Chapter 3. If you cannot locate the Sonoma Partners record in your system, select a different account record for this exercise.
BE SURE TO use the Windows Internet Explorer Web browser to navigate to your Microsoft Dynamics CRM Web site before beginning this exercise.
In the application menu toolbar, click the New Activity button, and then select Task to launch the New Task form.
In the Subject field, enter Send information to the customer.
By default, the Subject and Owner fields are the only data fields in which you must enter values before you can create a task.
In the Description field, enter Sample description of the task.
In the Regarding field, click the Look Up button. In the Look Up dialog box that opens, leave Account selected in the Look for field and enter Sonoma Partners in the box. Press the
key to submit your search.Tip
Although only one record can be entered in the Regarding field for each activity, the selected record can be one of many different types—a lead, an account, an opportunity, or a case, for example. Because the Regarding field links to several types of records, you must click the Look Up button to select the Regarding record; you cannot type in the Regarding field as you can with some of the other lookup fields in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
The Look Up dialog box filters the records to show the accounts that match your search phrase.
Click the Sonoma Partners record, and then click OK.
In the Due field, click the Calendar button, and select the date by which you want this task completed.
After you have selected a date, a drop-down list of times is activated on the form so you can select the specific time of day by which you want the task completed.
Select 1:00 PM.
You can mark the task as completed in two ways. First, in the form toolbar, on the Actions menu, click Close Task.
In the Close Task dialog box, click the Status list arrow to show the possible values.
With this technique, you can mark the task as Completed or Canceled. You would cancel the task if you did not complete the task but want to remove it from your list of open tasks. After you select the value you want, you would click the OK button to close the task.
For this exercise, click Cancel to keep the task active.
You will use an alternative method to close the task.
In the toolbar, click the Save as Completed button.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM marks the task as Completed and closes the task window. Using this technique will save you a few clicks, but you can’t use it to mark a task as Canceled.
Tip
You can also upload attachments to an activity record, which can be useful if you need to reference a specific file. Uploading a file to an activity follows the same process as uploading an attachment to an account, as explained in Chapter 3.