scheduling vacation time for a user

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  You could do a couple of things:

  1. Just setup an appointment in CRM and add that user as Required.  Set the Show Time As "Busy" or "Out-Of-Office".  Then save it.  This should keep them from appearing within the Service Pool.

  2. For option 2, you should be able to open up the User Account, Choose Work Hours from the left hand navigation.  Then at the top of the Calendar click "Set Up" -> Time Off and then put in the Start/End date.  This will stop the user from showing up as an available resource during that time period.

  Jeremy

  • Proposed as answer by Raymond B. Casey Tuesday, January 31, 2012 1:35 PM
  • Marked as answer by Rob-2112 Tuesday, January 31, 2012 7:04 PM

  Tuesday, January 31, 2012 12:06 AM
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  Thanks Jeremy.  I've gone through trialing several CRM systems and for us, hosted Microsoft CRM 2011 is the best solution by far, but every now and then I find an area that's really yet to be developed and I think calendaring (and working with shared calendars) is one of those places that could stand to have some time spend on enhancing the feature set.  It would be great if the users themselves could easily just add items to their personal calendars and have it reflected in the CRM calendars.

  Sounds like I will have to manually reconcile calendars to look for things like doctor's appointments, etc.

  Hopefully it's on the product road map.

  
  

  • Edited by Rob-2112 Tuesday, January 31, 2012 2:23 PM

  Tuesday, January 31, 2012 2:22 PM
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  Rob,

  Assuming User Permissions are set correctly, your end users should be able to:

  1. Update their work hours/add vacation

  2. Create an appointment that spans multiple days that will ensure they are blocked off from the service pool.  The key is that the appointment has to show as "Busy" in the details.  They can do this right in CRM.

  Are you using the Outlook Client at all?  If so, if someone is going to the Dr. and they create the appointment in Outlook, they can promote that item to CRM with a click of a button.  When I train clients on Service Scheduling I've found that to be the fastest and easiest way to allow users to block time off.  What is also nice, is that it's a 2-way sync.  They have thier personal appointments in Outlook but then anything related to the Service Pool getes generated in CRM and pushed to their Outlook Calendar so it's really merging the 2 of them together.  Then the appointment eventually hits their mobile device for dispatch management.

  Jeremy

  Tuesday, January 31, 2012 2:31 PM
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  They are putting their info it in Outlook, but unfortunately it goes into a shared calendar.  We'll make adjustments as needed, just trying to keep to the current user experience as much as possible to help with adpotion.

  Tuesday, January 31, 2012 2:42 PM
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  Eesh... I'm really running into adoption problems.  I have multiple people who often do things like receive an email for a meeting request and confirm they will be there, the meeting is then added to their calendar, but this will never be reflected in CRM.  Are there any third party solutions to deal with something like this?  I really need automated integration or people are simply not going to use this system for scheduling which is what we do.  We're a service oriented business and most of our people are on the road all day at customer appointments.

  Tuesday, February 7, 2012 8:41 PM
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  Rob,

  One thing I did find as it relates to Shared Calendars is that with the Outlook Client, you can track appointments on a shared calendar.  The biggest issue most of the time is how the permissions on the shared calendar are configured.  The following post (https://community.dynamics.com/product/crm/crmtechnical/b/crminthefield/archive/2011/05/24/outlook-shared-calendar-access-for-dynamics-crm.aspx) has some more detail around setting it up correctly.

  A company called Riva (http://www.rivacrmintegration.com) has a server side integration.  However, like the CRM Client the appointment still needs to be flagged as a CRM Appointment.  I haven't read much further into whether there is a way around it or not.  Also, when an appointment is accepted does it go into the User's personal calendar or the Shared Calendar?  I haven't worked a lot with Shared Calendars so I don't know a lot about how they really function in Outlook/Exchange.

  Since you are a CRM Online customer, you get free support requests with your subscription.  It might be worth opening a case with MSFT to get the official take on automatic synchronization of appointments. (Goto Resource Center -> Under the support heading in the right-pane -> New Support Request).  There are some drawbacks to having appointments automatically synchronize  to CRM, it leaves a lot of room for the wrong things to be tracked or to really fill up the Calenadars with appointments not necessarily needed or if someone just blocks off part of a day as a reminder this would make them unavailable for service scheduling.

  I'll keep my eye out for anything that may help in this situation and I'll do a bit more research as well.

  Jeremy

  ---

  Jeremy Winchell Avtex http://blog.avtex.com

  Tuesday, February 7, 2012 9:12 PM