After a couple of days without posting anything, I thought about explaining a real case scenario where your client would like to deal with meeting minutes inside Microsoft CRM.

This real case scenario is based, obviously, on Microsoft CRM 2011 and its ability to create new activity types (meaning: these new types are derivative of the ‘Activity’ entity).

The scenario is pretty simple: the client wants to track the meeting minutes in the CRM and use the field audit feature to track the meeting minutes revision (more on that in another post).

Furthermore, he/she (let’s not be sexist ) wants to be able to assign actions related to the meeting minutes (action plan definition). A good read about what “minutes” are is available here.

Here is the object model, based on the Microsoft CRM object model (available here):

How to create a new activity type

1. Create a new entity and give it a name (for example: ‘Meeting Minute’)
2. Check the ‘Define as an activity entity’ check box and keep the ‘Display in Activity Menus’ check box checked
3. Change the primary field name to reflect your needs
4. Save your new entity!
5. Now that your entity is created, you can modify the fields that have been created automatically by setting the ‘Define as an activity’ check box
   • ‘Rescription’ is renamed to ‘Report’: will hold all the meeting’s discussion points
   • ‘Owner’ is renamed ‘Submitter’: the person who submits the meeting minutes
   • ‘Required’ is renamed ‘Present’: the people who attended the meeting
   • ‘Optional’ is renamed ‘Absent’: the people who did not attend the meeting
   • ‘Actual End’ is renamed ‘End of Meeting’: the real meeting’s end time
   • ‘Actual Start’ is renamed ‘Start of Meeting’: the real meeting’s start time
   • ‘Subject’ is renamed ‘Purpose’: why is the meeting taking place anyway?
6. Last but not least, as you want to track all the meeting’s action points, you must create a 1:N relationship to the ‘Task’ entity (this way, you can use the “sub-grid” functionality in the form’s designer!)
7. When all of this is done, it’s time to edit the entity’s default form; I’ll put the form I designed for my client:
• On my form, I have 7 different “tabs”
• agenda: a meeting for what? / who is the organizer? / regarding what?
• attendees: who was there? / who wasn’t there?
• timeline: when did the meeting start? / when did it end?
• report: the meeting’s complete report (text field)
• action items: a list of tasks that are created during the meeting
• documents: uses the SharePoint list component to store documents
• notes: (self-explanatory)
• For visibility, I’ve also put the regarding field in the form’s header, which is a good way of knowing to which customer (for example) this meeting minute is linked to
• Also, I make a good use of the new form’s footer functionality by exposing the ‘Created By’ and ‘Created On’ fields as they are system fields which do not require any user-entry
8. The result of these customizations should look like this:

Conclusion

The concept of having the ability to create new activity types is awesome! You’re not limited anymore and only your imagination will limit you

This is the kind of customization I wanted to see a long time ago in CRM 3.0 & 4.0, hopefully it did come to life (there is still another thing that could be cool: the ability to “send” a meeting minute like a mail, but I haven’t found how yet, except with a workflow).