I understand that there is some discussion as to whether all activities should be associate and appear in the account. For example, when dragging emails into a Ticket, should the email be associated with the Account? I have heard the idea that there is no point in adding more “clutter” to the Accounts’ Notes/History by associating all emails to the Account. But I have also heard that all activities, emails, etc. should be associated with the Account. I would love to hear the case made for either methodology. What is lost when all activities place in an entity (such as Tickets) are not associated with the Account?

Thanks for the discussion.

From my point of view, the ideal is that all relevant history is avaible from the Account level. This should include emails and activities recorded against a ticket.

Ultimately, this is probably about what I like to think of as "research time" - the time spent reading notes/history/tickets/pending activities etc before you pick up the phone or go to the meeting with a customer. By having all communications on the account view, you don't have to drill in to each ticket or sub-entity to find out what was said or done. This saves a lot of time and clicks.

I can understand the fustration of having a very full notes/history tab, but by using the "schedule followup" options with "carry over notes" combined with the SHFT+F9 shortcut that timestamps comments boxes, the user should only really have to read the top few to get an optimum understanding of the recent history or future of the Account and contacts there.

That's my opinion anyway :-)

Ben

In actual fact - it's unavoidable (or should be! - but I also know it can be circumvented).

All entities (except user generated ones) do relate back to the account by default. So, if you create an activity for a contact, by inheritance, you also associated that to the account. When you complete the activity for the contact, it moves into history for that contact and, again by inheritance, also the account.

When you view history/activity by contact - you are seeing those hist/act items for that contact. But, you can roll-up to the account and see them there too. This gives you the overview of tha hist/act for that account (i.e. to see how active it is).

You can create a history/activity item for the account on its own - but not the lower level items, they always link back to account. This is by default and also to support sync (by starting at account, you can roll down and pickup data for everything that sits under it).

This is the same for tickets, opportunities - they work the same way.

Mike

Thank you both for the assistance. I am convinced that association of all activities in the Accounts so that they appear in the Notes/History is Best Practice. But I have been asked to make an analysis of all that will be impacted if we do not have all Ticket activities listed in the Accounts Notes/History. So far one of the major consideration is the ability to see interaction with a customer in the Notes/History regardless of whether the interaction was based on a sale, support, and so on. Are there other major considerations? I am very interested in understanding the last portion of what Mike said. He stated, "This is...also to support sync (by starting at account, you can roll down and pickup data for everything that sits under it.)" Can anyone provide a little more detail regarding the kind of synchronization which depends on the presents of Ticket activities (Phone calls, Emails, ToDo's) listed in the Accounts Notes/History?

As I learned earlier, no activities inserted into the Ticket Activities tab in the Ticket view are associated with the Account and thus are not listed in the Accounts Notes/History. The Ticket activities, such as an email which is dropped into the Ticket Activities Tab of the Ticket View, will be automatically associated with the Account and be listed in the Notes/History. But revisions to that entry in the Ticket Activities tab will not affect the same entry in the Notes/History. So the connection for these kind of activities still seems to only be a text reference and not really linked data.

Thanks for the brainstorm!



 

Hi!

Sorry, just noticed this - if you do choose not to associate (which is no problem, I still believe it should be avoided though!) then, in regards to sync, every record will be sent to the remote database (which is fine, as it means they are in sync).

Regards
Mike