Activity feeds entities

Article
07/22/2016

Applies To: Dynamics CRM 2015

The activity feeds help promote internal collaboration through quick and short updates in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The activity feeds do not replace emails or in-person communications. Instead, they augment these traditional methods with non-intrusive and non-urgent ways of communication.

The activity feeds enable a salesperson to stay on top of situations that involve people, accounts, leads, contacts, or opportunities. They provide easy and convenient ways of monitoring important information that can be critical for closing a deal.

With activity feeds you can easily accomplish important tasks, such as:

Share information about users, accounts, leads, and other entity records.
Receive important updates regarding opportunities, users, or other records.
Follow users, accounts, and other records.
Learn, in a timely manner, about updates regarding users, accounts, or opportunities and items that are related to them.
Take quick actions on specific updates to move your work towards successful completion.

As a developer you can consume and create activity feeds data programmatically. You can integrate activity feeds with other applications, and extend activity feeds to meet the needs of the organization. The following are examples of custom applications that you can build around activity feeds:

Build full-featured activity feeds clients to complement Microsoft Dynamics CRM out-of-the-box client experiences that include Web, Outlook, and Mobile clients. For example, you can develop a desktop client.
Build surfaces to expose activity feeds data inside other applications, such as SharePoint or enterprise resource planning (ERP).
Build custom business logic to create activity feed posts when internal Microsoft Dynamics CRM or external events occur. An example of an external event is an invoice creation in an external ERP system.
Perform specific actions when posts are created or deleted. For example, use a workflow to send an email when a post is created.

Note

In addition to activity feeds, from Microsoft Dynamics CRM you can directly connect to Yammer, a powerful tool for collaborating in your organization. For more information, see Connect to Yammer.