Monday, September 15, 2008

Mark appointment as complete from Outlook?

When attempting to execute some of the more common tasks of everyday work as a salesperson, my colleague Joakim Westergren and I found that there actually isn't a way of marking an appointment as complete from the normal appointment window in Outlook (like for instance a Task). If any of you reading this, know of a way, please let me know.



We did find a workaround however. We told the salespeople that when an appointment was to completed, to just add the words "DONE" or some other special character like "§" after the normal text in the description field. A workflow had been created that is triggered on changes to the description field and it checks to see if the text inside the field ends with "DONE" or the designated character. If so, the status of the appointment is changed to "Completed".



I realise that this isn't a perfect solution, a button would be suitable and less prone to error, but at least it is one way of handling it. I would be very intrested in any other solutions that you might have experience of, please leave a comment if you have any suggestions.



(Of course you can always open the CRM window and click "Save as completed" but that introduces a new GUI and complicates things for the users, we are looking for a simpler approach, just using Outlook)



Gustaf Westerlund
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Architect

Logica Sweden
www.logica.com

6 comments:

  1. This is a significant issue. Is there no better solution now in CRM 2011?

    ReplyDelete
  2. No, I have not found a better solution without custom coding a button with VSTO. The problem is really that appointments in Outlook do not support this feature to CRM doesn't have any corresponding function to integrate to. Appointments in Outlook just are never marked as completed.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi Gustaf,

    I am surprised Microsoft has not came out with this functionality OOTB. How has your experience been with users on this issue?

    My users complain about having to go into CRM to mark it as completed. Does your workaround workflow work well for the users? Have they complained much?In my experience, they always find something to complain about.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I agree. When I show this to users or point it out to consultants, all agree it is a bad lack of feature. The problem as I see it is that appointments in outlook do not have completed/not completed statuses but they do in CRM. So the functionality that is required is some special addons to Outlook to handle it. It could probably be developed with VSTO as a new button in the ribbon, but I havn't seen anyone do it yet.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Is this still an issue with MD CRM 2011? Will I have to code my own button through VSTO? And if so, do you know of any resources that may guide me through the process?

    Thank you so much!!!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Hi,
    yes, I am afraid this is still an issues with CRM 2011, 2013, 2015 and CRM 2016...

    I'll see if i can't publish the code we made previously for this.

    ReplyDelete