From CRM team member Hamish, an overview of how Activities are represented as well as some of the UI features as part of the December 2012 Service Update for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. If you'd like any more information, please ring or email me.
In the December 2012 Service Update the Account, Contact, Lead, Opportunity and Case forms have all been redesigned with a very clean and clear UI with no ribbon. This blog will focus on how Activities are represented on the new forms and some of the new UI features that I liked and others that still need improving.
A feature that the December 2012 Service Update has improved greatly on is how related activities are added and viewed. In the Activities section a summary of the related activities is shown which gives very much the same information that you would get from an activities sub-grid but in a better looking way. Grey highlighted activities represent the completed activities and non-highlighted are those still to be completed.
You can complete activities straight from the activities control without having to pop open a new window or go to the ribbon bar.
Upon clicking on an activity record, more details for that activity will appear inline on the form giving a lot more activity information related to the Account or Contact without having to pop open a new window.
Of course if all of the details of the activity need to be seen or the activity needs to be edited then the classic activity form can be opened in a new window using this button:
After working with the new form UI, going back to the classic view can look a bit odd. Apparently other CRM forms will be updated to the new type in future releases.
Adding a new phone call or task has been made even easier with inline Add Phone Call and Add Task controls. Only phone and task activities can be added in this way, if other activities such as email or appointments need to be added
inside CRM then the classic form will need to be used. I'm not sure why this restriction has been designed into the new UI but I can only assume that Microsoft expects that if users are creating emails or creating appointments then they will be using Outlook and the Outlook client with CRM to do so.
When creating a new phone call in the new UI the phone call will automatically be marked as completed. This is different to the functionality of the classic forms where adding a new phone call remains open until the user marks it as complete. In the situation where a user receives or makes a phone call on the fly they can quickly fill out the phone call details as they are on the phone. When they are done with the phone call they don't need to worry about marking it as
complete. If a future phone call is to be scheduled, a task is the more appropriate place to add this. Tasks do not
get marked as completed automatically in the new UI.
Overall, the usability of related activities on the new Account, Contact, Lead, Opportunity and Case forms included in the December 2012 Service Update has improved markedly. There are some things that still need improvement but I look forward to these being implemented in future releases.
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Kristy Brown
Dynamics CRM Service Line Manager
Koorb Consulting
+64274 774 384
The article Activities in the Dynamics CRM December 2012 Service Update was first posted at Koorb Consulting