Microsoft CRM 4.0 Part - III

Activity Model:
Activity is an abstraction, which can be of any type in CRM. Activity is a user entity; it is performed by a user, assigned to a user or shared with users. We have parties involved in an activity, information of how the activities participated in the activity and optionally entity regarding which this activity is. Activity, participants, participation type, regarding entity

Primary Activities:
E-mail, Fax, Letter, Phone call, Task

Related Activities:
E-mail template, E-mail attachment, Activity party, Mail merge template Other Activity Entities: Appointment, Service appointment, Campaign, Campaign response, Case resolution, close, Order close and Quote close

Workflow execution is supported on following activity types:
E-mail, Phone call, Fax, Letter, Task, Appointment, Service appointment
“All entities that are related to an activity have there own states and are managed by system itself like a an email becomes Sending when email router picks an email for send process and is set to sent when email is successfully sent”

Relation of Activity with an Entity:
Every activity is related to some entity, Email is an entity if we have a email activity that means the system has a activity which is related to email, activity it self is an entity and resides separately in the system.
Example: Activity has one-to-one relation with email

MetaDataSchema.Entity:
This is the table in database which contains data of all entities in the CRM, the GUID, ObjectTypeCode and all other information is available here.
SELECT * FROM MetaDataSchema.Entity

Creating Simple Email Activity:
1. Go to CRM using web client
2. Now select My Work Place and click “Activities” under “My Work”
3. When “New” is clicked a list of activities are shown which can be created, the list contains “Task, Fax, Phone call, Email, Letter, Appointment, Service activity and Campaign response”. We will select an email
4. This is show a standard email composing form, here user will specify From, To, CC, BCC, Subject, Body, Attachment, etc
5. by default from contains the user name of currently logged in user, although if a user has rights he can change that to another user
6. We select a contact in To and enter subject and body text
7. Email can be sent to account, contact, lead, queue and user
8. There is also a field of regarding; this is used to specify a entity about which this email activity will be created, like I have to sent an email to the customer regarding his pending invoice, so I will select that invoice in regarding. Only one entity can be selected in regarding.
9. we can either Save and close this activity or Send, if click Send the activity is saved and send at once, if we only save at this point that we can send this email later from activities section
10. We will save this email activity and close
11. On the activities screen, I will select email in “Type” dropdown, this will show my emails, the email at this point is being shown in “Draft” status, this means I can still edit this email and send
12. If I send this email, the status now shows “Pending send”, it remains in this status until picked by email router; email router will set its status to “Sending” and will remain “Sending” unless it is sent or failed.