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I'm confused on the new "Related Activities" feature. When I click on the activity dropdown box to associate a related activity, all I see are a bunch of numbers.  There are no names that would allow me to make any sense of these numbers.  How in the world can a user be expected to memorize an aribtrary number for hundreds of activities? 

I can totally see where you're coming from on this.  When you schedule a follow-up activity using the “Schedule a follow-up" checkbox, the activity number for the current activity gets inserted into the related activity number field for the follow-up activity.  Therefore when you go and open that follow-up a week later (or whenever you've set it for) the previous comments are there and the field for related activity number is filled in with the original activity number.  

We could opt to make this field read only.  My only hesitation for doing this is if for some reason someone wants to change the related activity number.  Do you feel there would ever be a need to change the related activity number?  We’re certainly open to the idea.  If fact at one point, this was read only and we changed it during internal testing to be editable.  

The way I would fix this is not by changing the activity number but by allowing us to give activities subject lines like you can in Outlook.  Then you could keep your default activity number which doesn't mean anything to us and instead we would see the activity subject (and customer) in the related activity dropdown field instead of the number.  I've always thought there should be a nice clear subject line for activities . . . instead of relying on automated subject assignments or the comments field. 

I just noticed this as well. I was creating a new activity by logging a phone call.

I wanted to link the new phone call activity to an existing activity such as an email or a work order. When I click the dropdown, all that is visible is the activity number and status. The comments would certainly be helpful in the list to know which activity I am looking for. The date and activity type would also be helpful. It would also be nice for the list to be filtered to only show activites for the customer that is selected. I can't think of a situation where I would need to link an activity to another customer's activity (not to see some people may want to do that). 

Matt,

I think the best course of action right now is to make this read only.  I'll explain why.

The related field represents the activity number that this activity is related to.  If the current activity was created through the schedule a follow-up checkbox, you wouldn't have to search for it using the dropdown.  

In the event that you're creating a new activity and want to relate it with an old activity, on the left side of the screen you'll notice a grid for activities.  This grid filters to show only activities for the contact you are creating the activity for. If you would like to relate this activity with a previous activity, you can do so by clicking the "relate" link next to the activity in the grid on the left.  

Normally for follow-ups you don't have to do this because this field gets updated automatically when you create the follow-up.  

Danny,

I didn't notice the relate link on the activity grid to the left. You're right, that's a much nicer way of doing things!

Here is the related link I was referring to in my previous post.  This will fill in the activity # in the related activity dropdown for you automatically.