You cannot imagine Dynamics CRM without activities, Soluzione’s Activity Timeline Add-On for Dynamics 365 CRM provides you a smart and interactive activity timeline-based view for any Dynamics CRM entity. This Add-on facility provides an entire interaction as well as communication history in a fashion which makes timeline data insightful and fun.
The key features of the Advanced Activity Timeline – CRM add-on are:
- Single Integrated View to view various activities and notes in a single pane. The view provides a visually appealing insightful view with icons and colors encouraging users to contribute more.
- Search and Filter provides an activity filter allowing users the ability to only view certain types of activity and search within activities. It also has the capability to search within all or specific entities.
- Contextual Actions are smart inline which varies based on the activity type and activity status.
- Extendable – One of the main issues with Dynamics CRM standard activity timeline is that it is not extendable (at least yet). As Activity timeline is a custom solution it overcomes that limitation and can be customized easily. You can reach out to us for any customization requests.
We have till date released 2 versions of activity timeline since its inception, the first release focused more on showing the activities in a single integrated timeline manner and the second release took it further courtesy some great feedback from our customer such as search within activities, etc.
Now we are planning to make the next release of activity timeline. The core ideology behind the enhancements is to make it more user-friendly and add functionalities that make sense for end-users as well as enhances performance. We have some items already lined up and we are happy to share some of the key enhancements:
- Business Analytics: Getting business insights into activities is key to understand customer behavior via interactions. The activity timeline will have an analytics area comprising of charts depicting the activity split for a record. One of the charts we are planning is a timeline chart indicating the interaction pattern with the customer.
- Activity Types: This functionality controls are the type of activities that will be displayed on the activity timeline control. This way customers will be able to reduce the clutter and focus on key activities that make sense for the business.
- Specific Form: Many times, there are requirements to add custom fields on an activity form and then you want to open that form and not standard form. The activity timeline configuration settings will have a specific setting to indicate if there a specific form to open rather than the default form.
- Lazy Loading: This enhancement is more tuned towards performance. Currently, the activity timeline by design loads all activities. Normally this does not affect majority of the time but then we have come across some cases wherein there are just too many activities and it takes a bit of time to load all activities in the activity pane. In future we are planning to use lazy loading i.e. load some initial set of records and as user scrolls then load the other set of records.
- D365 V9 API enhancements: While the current release works on Dynamics 365 v9 and even on a unified interface but we want to keep up the pace with changing SDK’s of Dynamics CRM. One of the key items is to get rid of the deprecated API’s and switch to the new API’s available in Dynamics 365 v9.
There are some more requirements such as moving the activity timeline code base to PCF (PowerApps Component Framework) to provide a more immersive experience with Dynamics 365 CRM Unified Interface.
We understand that customers and businesses have different requirements and the Dynamics CRM community out there are working hard with customers in addressing those requirements.
And for sure at Soluzione we have not seen it all and hence we will be more than happy to hear from you if these features make sense or what other features would you like to see. Please provide us with your valuable feedback and suggestion in the comments section. Our engineering team will be happy to go through each of them, understand them and try to implement them as much as possible.
Looking forward to feedback, it then Happy CRMing…
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