Last updated by yautja_cetanu on Fri, 2011-08-26 14:49
Activities are a key component of CRM.
Are they relationships? Are they not necessarily?
what types of activities can we imagine?
It seems to me that we will need a generic activity API that lets potentially any module register an activity.
- interaction between staff and contact, eg phone call
- email: sent, read, etc
- donation
- contact activity on the site as a user, eg
-- page views
-- voting
-- facebook like / tweeting / sharing - extern contact activity (eg tweets, facebook mentions, ...) !?
- edit changes (like "user XY edited contact info", link to revision diff if available)
- incoming requests (tickets) ?
- status changes of associated workflow elements (eg associated lead has been converted to opportunity)
- status changes of associated tasks
- notifications (eg a there has been sent a newsletter/sms/... to the contact)
- changes for some specific fields (like contact has been added to another type, or has been flagged as important)
- contact has been added to a group (like company), ...
so an activity might consist of
- date of action,
- action
- type
- owner (drupal user responsible for this)
- associated contact (context)
- ...
One guy's understanding: Activity is an entity with a start time and an end-time. Aim is to track any interaction between the organisation and other people and people within the organisation.
So it seems like Activities can sometimes be different things:
Different types:
1) Relations between 2
- User 3 phones User 7
2) Relations between n (Is this actually different to the above thing?)
- Event attended by n users
3) Relations between 2 but one isn't in Drupal
- User 3 visits her Dad
4) Relations that don't have an end point
- User 4 ponders thoughtfully
I feel like 1 and 2 may be solved by making a relation with a time period. I think 3 and 4 may be flags with a time period. Our Activity API would therefore mainly just use relations and flag.
Comments
Microsoft CRM Activities
Microsoft CRM activities are phone/fax/task/email/appointment and so on. Interesting that they always have one owner (user) but can have many 'regarding' parties and many 'recipients'. This allows for appointments to have multiple people and so on.
See http://www.redware.com/handbooks/ms_crm_handbook/microsoft_crm_activitie...
Microsoft CRM Activities
Microsoft CRM activities are phone/fax/task/email/appointment and so on. Interesting that they always have one owner (user) but can have many 'regarding' parties and many 'recipients'. This allows for appointments to have multiple people and so on.
See http://www.redware.com/handbooks/ms_crm_handbook/microsoft_crm_activitie...
Microsoft CRM Activities
Microsoft CRM activities are phone/fax/task/email/appointment and so on. Interesting that they always have one owner (user) but can have many 'regarding' parties and many 'recipients'. This allows for appointments to have multiple people and so on.
See http://www.redware.com/handbooks/ms_crm_handbook/microsoft_crm_activitie...
I am not sure about this. I
I am not sure about this.
I see activities as a sort of history of actions associated with a contact, a user, or another entity.
So for my point of understanding we don't need a start- and end-time, one datetime field should be enough (for when the action has been triggered).
Yes, there could be tasks scheduled, but as activity I would just logg that an associated task has been generated or that the task has been closed.
And as said on the sprint yesterday I would have a look at the message module for this: http://drupal.org/project/message
A lot of activities could be just added with rules and thus this would be configurable in the UI. Views integration would be also already there, so we could list activities with views.
Comparison of similar modules
Here's a link to a recent comparison of modules that perform in a similar capacity to the Message module
https://drupal.org/node/1279696#comment-4991274
The conclusion seems to be that the Activity Log module might be a little more effective right now.