How to Manage Activities with Dynamics Calendar

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How to Manage Activities with Dynamics Calendar
Activities in Dynamics 365 are tasks related to
customer entity like a call, setting up a
meeting, appointment, sending pricing quotes or
emails, etc. You can assign these activities to
yourself or other team members. Here the
question arises, how can you make the most out of
them? For example, if you are in a meeting with
your customers, you need to be specific with what
they are looking for in your services. Did they
ask for enhancements in your current package or
expressed concerns for budgets? Or any highlights
of the meeting. Chances are that you might
forget these little details. In such cases, you
can open your Dynamics CRM in mobile and add
these notes in the specific appointment created
for the meeting. This can help you focus on the
details leading to more clients for your
organization. So, lets see how you can manage
activities in Dynamics CRM to make the most out
of it.
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Step 1 Find your activities ? Click on the
sitemap and select activities.
From the list, select an activity type to manage
a particular activity.
You can perform the following operations on any
activity with the default Dynamics
calendar Add activity For customer You can
add activity associated with a particular
customer, account, or another type of record. To
do so,
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• Open the record for which you want to create the
  activity.
• In the Timeline section, click on , and from
  the drop-down list, select the type of activity
  you want to create.

• For yourself
• In the site map, select Activities.
• From the command bar, select an activity type.

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- Once you are done filling in the details, click
on save to save the particular activity.
You can also add other people to the record or
contact based on whos handling that particular
customer. As you work with that customer over a
period of time, it can help you maintain its
history and see what can be done for better
outcomes.Add task or note for yourself to
remember something important, add new activities
and assign it to others, mark it complete, etc.
to manage it further. Challenges with default
activity management Managing activities this
way means a lot of back and forth and wasted
time. Every time you will have to select the
record, create an activity and then manage its
related activities. To cut down this back and
forth, you can look for a calendar solution or
extension which provides a unified interface to
conduct all the operations from a single
screen. In this blog, weve taken Calendar 365,
a Dynamics CRM Calendar, to show how you can
manage activities from a single calendar screen.
If required you can view your teams schedule
via a shared calendar and assign activities to
them as well. Lets see how you can manage
activities from a shared calendar. Step 1 After
installing Calendar 365, navigate to the left
panel and select the Calendar 365 option.
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Step 2 Click on View Calendar from the second
panel and then click on the select calendar to
select the view/shared calendar.
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Step 3 Check the available time slot for the day
to assign activities to users. Step 4 Click on
the available time slot to create activity.
Step 5 Select the activity type from the
available options.
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Step 6 Add details regarding, subject, priority,
adding notes, etc. and click on create.
Here are the fields explained in
detail Activity To select the type. It can be
an appointment, phone call, meeting, task, SMS,
etc. Subject Add something to remember the
activity from. It will be displayed on your
calendar as well. Regarding Here you can
select the record, regarding which you are
creating this activity. Date Range Select a
date range during which you will be working on
this activity. Priority As there would be
multiple activities in your calendar, you can set
its priority to manage the overall
schedule. Description Add notes or any other
required details. It helps you remember
highlights. Apart from these options, based on
your activity type, you will get other options
like for Fax, Phone calls you get extra fields
like To, Phone numbers, etc.
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Step 7 Once you are done creating an activity,
it will be displayed like below on the calendar.
When you hover on it, it will display the tooltip
with all the required details.
You can work further on this activity, and access
it whenever needed. For example, if this
activity is an appointment, you can mark it
completed once your meeting is completed with
that person. And later, you can edit the details
from the calendar. To edit this activity, click
on the activity from the calendar and this popup
will be displayed.
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From there you can perform various operations
like edit the appointment details, change its
status, mark it completed, make it a case, etc.
and it gets updated in CRM as well. How to
Manage Unscheduled Activities in Dynamics
CRM There might be situations when you would
have to manage sudden priority work in your
schedule. Those are considered as unscheduled
activities. To manage the unscheduled
activities, it is important to check the Active
box. On enabling the Unscheduled Activities
option, you can manage unscheduled appointments
and service activities without attendees and
assigned resources respectively from the
calendar. After enabling the Unscheduled
Activities option from the configuration, the
button will appear on the header on the main
calendar page.
By clicking on it, there will be a dialog box
with a list of Unscheduled Activities. Select
the start date, end date, and activity type to
create the view of unscheduled activities as
required. You can also type in the subject line
in the search box to look for a particular
activity.
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• If the activity type is appointment, it will
  show all the appointments that dont have any
  required attendees assigned.
• To assign attendees to an appointment, select
  appointment as the activity type from the
  dropdown, select activities and click on Set
  Required button.
• By clicking on the Set Required button, it will
  open a dialog box to select the required
  attendee.
• Select the attendee as required and click on the
  Save button.

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• After saving, attendees get assigned and that
  activity gets removed from the list of
  unscheduled activities.
• If activity type is a service activity, the
  list will have all the service activities that
  dont have resources assigned.
• To assign resources to the service activity,
  select service activity as the activity type from
  the dropdown, select the service and click on
  Set Resource button.

By clicking on the Set Resource button, a
dialog box will open. From there, select the
required resource and click on the Save button.
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- After saving, resources get assigned and that
activity gets removed from the list of
unscheduled activities. Original
Blog https//www.appjetty.com/blog/how-to-manage-
activities-with-dynamics-calendar