Activities or Events - managing internal or case-based meetings

[petednz]

Hi - I need to start looking at how we can use CiviCRM to manage internal and non-public meetings so we can track who was invited/attended - and preferably what the issue related too and keep notes on the meeting. So was ready to give Activities and Cases a hard try out.

First up it seems odd that I can only set PHone and Meeting to involve two people.

I had been hoping we could use this to track who attends internal and non-public meetings - ie ones that do not need to be set up as Events. This would also cover conference calls.

Is the recommendation that we use Event for such matters?

If we use Events (back to beginner level for me here) I can't see an easy option of select an Organisation's 'office' as the address - which would be helpful ( i hate making people enter data that already exists ;-)

If we use Events there is no obvious option to allocate to Cases which takes me back to wanting to use Activities in a way that may not have been intended.

Any good examples of organisations using CiviCRM to track the internal or out-of-sight meetings etc?

[petednz]

Time for some monologuing 

Had a flash that maybe i could select several people then 'more actions' "record activity for contact' - but no this just allows setting up multiple one-to-one activities

however spotted that the 'more actions' gives an 'activity' interface that does not have 'Cases' etc so i think this should be updated to reflect current 'activity' form.

[Dave Greenberg]

Peter - Good news and bad news...
Good news is that the schema for Activities (as of 2.0) was deliberately "renovated" to support a 1 to many relationship between the initiator ("source") of an activity and the "target contacts" as well as "assignees".

The bad news is that the interface hasn't yet caught up with this change. It does seem like the "Record Activity for Contacts" interface could:

A.  automatically link all selected contacts to a single activity
OR
B. give users a choice to create multiple one-to-one activities OR a single activity.

I think I'd vote for A, since it seems closer to the likely intent.

Related to this, we probably need a way to "add more contacts" to an existing activity - which is also not currently possible.

Depending on how important this is, might be a good "project" for Chris to work on during the Melbourne boot camp ??

(BTW - I don't think Events is the right way to go for tracking internal meetings, although you can save the effort of re-entering location information by copying an existing event.)

[petednz]

Hi Dave - yes I had thought of that as something for Chris to take to Melbourne - along with several others.

Good news is that the schema for Activities (as of 2.0) was deliberately "renovated" to support a 1 to many relationship between the initiator ("source") of an activity and the "target contacts" as well as "assignees".

The bad news is that the interface hasn't yet caught up with this change. It does seem like the "Record Activity for Contacts" interface could:

So, am I clear. The underlying structure can cope with one-to-many but there is no way to do this right now? Here is some input on how I would make use of this.

Scenario A:
Secretary of MP invites/ is invited to meet with representatives of a sector eg Forestry. We would want to flag
- who 'owns' the meeting
- who was invited
- who attended the meeting
- location
- case (as in a category for the sector/topic)
- notes from meeting (and would like to restrict access for these to the secretary/MP)

[Dave Greenberg]

So, am I clear. The underlying structure can cope with one-to-many but there is no way to do this right now? Here is some input on how I would make use of this.

Scenario A:
Secretary of MP invites/ is invited to meet with representatives of a sector eg Forestry. We would want to flag
- who 'owns' the meeting
- who was invited
- who attended the meeting
- location
- case (as in a category for the sector/topic)
- notes from meeting (and would like to restrict access for these to the secretary/MP)

No way to do this now via interface - but structure could support "most of this". Issues I see are:

* You can add Activity Status options for "Invited" and "Attended" via the existing admin interface - but I don't think there's an efficient way to update the status for the "batch" of invitees after the meeting occurs.

* Pretty sure there's no mechanism to restrict access to Activity Notes.