Rose Business Solutions Dynamics CRM

I have wanted to have information about the last activity for any specific contact to be displayed on the contact record and in various views, and found an easy way to do it.  I was helped a great deal by this post by Joel Lindstrom.

The first thing to do is create new fields and add them to the Contact form.  I created a date field to display the date of the last activity, and a text field to display the subject of the last activity.

My objective is to show the date and subject of the last activity that was completed for each contact.  So the next step is to create individual workflows for each specific type of activity in CRM, e.g. Task, Phone Call, Appointment, E-mail.

This is how the workflow for Phone Calls looks:

The entity is, Phone Call; and I want to update the Contact.  I chose to have the workflow activate when the Actual End date changes (signifying that the activity is complete).  I also chose to allow the workflow to run on demand so that I could run it against the past month’s worth of Phone Call activities.

There are just two properties I’m going to update on the contact, the date, and the subject of the Phone Call.  I also am going to add a bit of text before the subject to indicate what type of activity it is.

Once I complete a Phone Call, this is what the contact record looks like:

You can create separate workflows for each of the different types of activities that you want to update the record.  I had to experiment a bit in order to determine what attribute(s) I wanted to use to trigger the workflow.

You can also include the new fields in your views and advanced find searches.  It was easy to do, and a good example of how to use simple workflows in CRM 4.0.