CRM activity Records

Microsoft Dynamics CRM has different Activity entities, showing actions from the CRM users.  ActivityPointer records are automatically created when an Activity record is created, enabling developer to retrieve different Activity types with one request.

Activities are the actions users do in CRM, often tracking the interaction between users and customers.

CRM has lots of different activities

• PhoneCall
• Task
• Letter
• Email
• Appointment
• Fax
• Custom Activities

Tracking the activity of users/customers, records the time spent on CRM records. For cases, you can see activities associated with the case.   Tracking activities allows different people to work a record with a full knowledge of the status of the case.

Activity facts

1. Activity is an entity in CRM, you can look at it in the custom solution
2. The activity entity is non-editable.
3. Activity schema name is ActivityPointer e.g ActivityPointer = Activity
4. ActivityPointer is not the same as Activity Party

Microsoft ActivityPointer description

“Task performed, or to be performed, by a user. An activity is any action for which an entry can be made on a calendar.”

What’s the purpose of the Activity Entity?

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

Albert Einstein

To understand a CRM functionality, you need to understand its purpose.   Once you understand what it’s used for, how it works and why it works in that way.

The purpose of the Activity entity is in the schema name – ActivityPointer.  Developers can retrieve all activities with one request, instead of multiple retrieves using the different activity types.

The activity views allow you to show all activities for a record, despite the activities being different types (e.g. Email, PhoneCall, Task)

The CRM SDK has a great page on Activity entities.

The diagram shows why understanding Activities is important, Activities are linked to the primary entities in CRM.  Activity entity acts like an interface between primary entities and individual activities.

ActivityId’s are the same because an Activity record is created by CRM when an activity record (Task/PhoneCall/Email/etc) is created.

Activity Types

Doing an advanced find, you can use the Activity Type field on the ActivityPointer entity to see what Activites types can be ActivityPointer records.  The Activity Type is a Global option set

from the CRMHosk Blog