Activity

An Activity is used to collect information about a set of actions, an event, something that needs to get done, etc. openCRX supports various Activity Types, e.g. Incidents, Meetings, Sales Visits, Phone Calls, E-mails, etc. The figure below shows a Meeting as an example of an activity:

Some activity types feature type-specific attributes (see section Activity Types for a detailed discussion), but all Activities share a common set of attributes:

Anatomy of an Activity:

• Name of the Activity

• # contains the number of the Activity (it's actually a string to make integration with third-party systems easier.) - if you create an Activity with the operation "New Activity", openCRX will automatically generate an activity number for you by incrementing the highest existing activity number by 1

• use Description for a short summary (approximately 60 or fewer characters) of the Activity, and Detailed Description to provide detailed information about the Activity; if appropriate, make use of the HTML feature to add explicit structure; this makes your Detailed Description easy to skim (you can start the HTML editor by clicking on the small icon [HTML] located just above the input field)

• Assigned to contains a reference to the contact whom this Activity is assigned to - some operations (e.g. "Assign to me") change the value of this field

• use Miscellaneous #1 to #3 to provide additional information

• Contract can contain a reference to a contract (e.g. Sales Order, Service Contract, etc.); this information is helpful as a reminder or useful for billing purposes

• the current state of an Activity is reflected by the value of State of Activity (where Activity is usually replaced by the type of the Activity); the set of valid states depends on the type of Activity - some operations (e.g. "Mark as complete") change the value of this field; typically, various Open states and various Closed states are supported

• Priority indicates whether an Activity must be treated/processed with high or low priority (by default, openCRX supports the following values: low, normal, high, urgent, immediate)

• the fields Scheduled start and Scheduled end contain date/time information reflecting the planned scheduling of the Activity

• use Due by to indicate by when (date/time) an Activity must be completed

• the fields Actual start and Actual end contain actual date/time information

• use % complete to indicate what percentage of the total required effort has been made so far - some operations (e.g. "Mark as complete") change the value of this field

• hh (estimated effort) and mm (estimated effort) is information that is typically provided by a person who is responsible for the Activity - a guess on how many hours and minutes of effort it takes to complete the Activity

• Max deviation in % contains the maximum (expected) deviation of the actual effort from the estimated effort in % of the estimated effort - high values indicate a low confidence in the accuracy of the estimated effort numbers

• hh (actual effort) and mm (actual effort) are derived from the information contained in the linked Work Records

• Total votes contains the number of votes that have been cast for this Activity

To find out about other openCRX objects related to the Activity at hand, explore the information that is available in the many Grids, e.g.

• Assigned Trackers contains a list of all the activity trackers this Activity is assigned to (because an individual activity can be assigned to multiple activity trackers - see Activity Tracker for additional information)

• Linked Activities contains a list of all the linked activities, i.e. other Activities referenced by this Activity (see Activity Links for additional information)

• Inbound Activity Links contains a list of all the activities with links to this Activity, i.e. other Activities referencing this Activity (see Activity Links for additional information)

• Involved Contacts (or Involved Accounts, depending on the Activity Types) contains a list of all the contacts (accounts) playing an important role with relation to this Activity

• Work Records contains a list of all the work records submitted for this Activity (see Work Records for additional information)

• Votes contains a list of all the votes cast for this Activity (see Votes for additional information)

• Notes are particularly important in the context of Incident Management, but typically they play an important role in managing other activities too