Introduction to Activities

Creating Activities in Workbooks enables you to track and record the interactions you have with People, Leads and Organisations. You can schedule an Activity to take place in the future, specifying the date that the Activity should take place and/or you can document an Activity that has already taken place (such as an inbound telephone call).

Activities can be linked to other records, most commonly (but not exclusively) a person and that person’s name and contact details will appear on the Activity record as the Primary Contact.

Within Activities, you can configure:

• Types: Tasks (which can be a Phone Call or a To-do) and Meetings.  The principal difference is that Meetings include fields to record the start and end dates and times for the Meeting.  In addition, Meeting Activities can be downloaded in iCal format so they can be shared easily with an external calendar such as Outlook.
• Attendees: Tasks can have attendees just like Meetings. By default, this section is hidden on the Form Layout. You can customise the Layout to show this section and place it in the desired position on the Task Form Layout if required.
• Notifications & Reminders: You can set reminders to ensure that Activities aren’t overlooked. The default behaviour of these is controlled within Preferences.
• Uploading Attachments: Files can be uploaded to an Activity record for reference. Documents uploaded in this way can be accessed by other Workbooks users too.
• Activity Notes: You can use the Description field to add notes, which can be a useful reminder about the purpose of the Activity and any previously agreed actions.
• Follow-on Activities: Workbooks can complete an open Activity and generate a follow-on at the click of a button. There are two options that can be used, either clicking complete & follow-on or customising the Form Layout to include two new fields to simplify creating a Task of the same type.
• Emails: Emails can be sent from within an Activity and are automatically related to the Activity.
• See all records connected to a specific Activity from within the Related Items tab.
• Watch specific Activities, and customise your My Activities Landing Page, so you can easily see your most important Activities.

In addition, you can map the status of an Activity to an Associated State of either ‘open’ or ‘closed’. Activities with an Associated State of open will appear in the various open views on an Activity Landing Page whilst those with an Associated State of closed will show in the closed view.