Calendar

What it is and what it's for

The Calendar takes your Events (one of the five Activity types in the CRM, along with Tasks, Notes, Calls and Visits) and draws them on a visual agenda instead of showing them as a plain list. It shows up to 100 events associated with your user, using each event's Description as the appointment's title, its Notes as the detail, and its Start and End dates to place it on the corresponding day's grid.

It's a read-only screen: it helps you visualize your agenda at a glance, but it doesn't replace the Activities screen for creating, editing or deleting your appointments (see "How to use it" below).

How to use it

1. Open the Calendar. You'll find it in the Other / Home menu as Calendar. By default it opens showing today's date.
2. Pick the view you prefer. Switch between the Day, Week and Month views to see your agenda with more or less detail as needed.
3. Navigate between dates. Use the calendar's navigation controls to move forward or backward in time, or to quickly jump back to today's date.
4. Filter by Shared Calendar. If your company uses Shared Calendars, you can pick the resource (calendar) you want to view events by; each calendar shows up with the name it has in the Shared Calendars catalog.
5. Review an appointment's detail. Click or hover over an event to see its title and notes.
6. Create, edit or delete an event from Activities. The Calendar doesn't let you add, change or delete appointments directly on the grid; for that, go to Transactions > CRM > Activities, Events tab, where you can set the date, time, shared calendar and recurrence. The change is reflected automatically the next time you open the Calendar.

Main capabilities

• Day, Week and Month views over the same events, with a modern, Office 365-style visual theme.
• Grouping of events by Shared Calendar, to visually separate the agenda of different teams or processes.
• Display of the recurrence defined on each Event (daily, weekly, monthly or yearly) exactly as it was set up in Activities.
• Automatic refresh: as soon as you create, edit or delete an Event from Activities, the Calendar shows the change.

Key fields

The Home Calendar panel and the full Calendar screen

Besides this screen, AdmCloud has a Calendar panel you can add to your Home screen from Customize Dashboard. That panel shows the current month and, when the panel space is too tight, it offers the View full calendar link, which opens a dedicated screen with the same calendar much bigger: it takes the full available width and shows every event of each day instead of collapsing them into a "+2 more".

Both the panel and the full screen ask the server for data for the date range you are looking at: moving to another month queries again, so you always see up-to-date information without reloading the page.

That calendar brings together, in a single place:

• CRM Events (your appointments, with their recurrence already expanded).
• Pending CRM Tasks that have an expiration date, on the day they are due.
• Birthdays of active Contacts, taken from the Birthday field of the contact card.
• Birthdays of active Employees, taken from the Human Resources tab of the employee card.

Each type has its own color, with a legend above the calendar. Birthdays repeat every year automatically; there is no need to register them as events. Clicking one opens the contact or employee card, and clicking an appointment or task opens its Activity.

The legend also works as a filter: click a color box to show or hide that type of event on the calendar, without reloading the page. By default Events and Tasks are on and both Birthday types are off, since most companies prefer not to see them unless they turn them on. The choice is remembered the next time you open the panel or the full screen, but it is saved on that browser only: signing in from a different computer or browser starts over with the defaults.

Availability and permissions

• The Calendar itself is available to any logged-in user, with no additional permission of its own.
• What you see there depends on your Event Activities: the Events tab in Activities requires the Enterprise plan; on other plans you can't create Events and the Calendar shows up empty.
• Filtering by Shared Calendar requires your company to have that feature enabled (Enterprise edition, beta feature); see the Shared Calendars page for details.
• To create, edit or delete the Events that feed the Calendar you need the CRM "Activities" permission at the matching level.

Tips and common mistakes