I am currently evaluating CRM and PM solutions for our company and love simplicity of Daylite. However, the fact that I can't associates Activity sets to pipelines, or pipeline stages makes me less inclined to use the product.

What would be immensely helpful is if there was a way to create activity sets that you could link to a specific pipeline.

It would also be nice if you could actually click on the stage in the visual display of the pipeline to navigate to that stage without actually changing the stage that you are at.

What would be even better is if you could have Sub-pipelines for each stage of a pipeline. You could then associate activities and sub activities in the same way.

By way of example, we manufacture and deliver material to large commercial building projects. We manufacture and deliver by floor. Our processes/activities/tasks are the same for each delivery. Most of the time we deliver to 30 floors of the course of 9 months. We think of the project as broken up into many sub projects by floor.

It would be very helpful if when you set a project up you could list the number of sub-projects (pipelines) and they would be automatically populated and then you could populate further sub-projects or pipelines underneath each stage of the higher order pipelines.

Does anybody know if you could actually have a developer customize the program with the developer kit to do this?

mc

Hi All,
Currently using DL and I think Activity Sets and Tasks should be allowed to definitely link to individual stages of a pipeline...

The ideas submitted suggested regarding activity sets linked to the stages of a pipeline should be considered. These are a must for the DL community. This would give people greater control over their projects and improve the user experience enormously. This would be a no brainer to use and increase productivity for the user. I AGREE CAN WE PLEASE INCLUDE the ideas posted before me or ACTIVITY SETS LINKED TO A PIPELINE STAGE AT LEAST ???

KC

This message has been edited. Last edited by: KC,

Couldn't agree more. But as this is such an obvious and desired improvement that hasn't been approached I'm guessing a: it's a difficult function to code b: that DL doesn't want to commit to the app being a project planner in addition to a CRM. It's a shame because of course it's the exact fuction that anyone running a usiness would want, so I'm guessing for some reason it doesn't fir into DL's plans for developement if it has gone unadressed for this many years.

Just my 2c.

Kevin

This could be the case Kevin...I think it would provide a great base level project management tool for small business and put DL miles a head of the race for small business CRM supremacy. When a more detailed high level Project P tool is required Merlin (that already plugs into Billings and could plug into DL if Marketcircle did not want to pursue its own PM tool )would be a great tool to go to the next level. If everyone that wants the feature keeps requestsing it maybe we will get it.

I have vast number of workflows I want to automate. To support the growth of my business.
This would ad significant value

Kempton

Hi Kempton,

Many thanks for your post.

That is the question. If DL WANTS to migrate towards a basic PM functionality. To my mind I would be racing towards that goal given the amount off people who obviously need it.

I would run a poll and if there's a resounding response then I'd expand. If not another company will fill that space quite quickly I think.

I have experimented with merlin and think it's super but way ahead of what most ll to mid size companies would require. It would bee perfect for constructions, mass sales, where there are 100s of inventory items involved or similar numbers of clients.

For small companies, creative boutiques, mom and pop stores, it wopuld bee overkill. I found it quite time absorbing and let it go ultimately. you would definitely need a dedicated person to manage both DL and Merlin.

Hoping DL will extend a little and satisfy the client base who need level one of PM functionality.

Best,

Kevin

Thanks for your feedback on Merlin. Interesting and good food for thought. As its another process and another system to manage.

In our business when working on a project we may have 2 people internal working on the project timeline/tasks and upto 4 people external who can be working on assigned tasks.

Ideally we would like them to update their progress into the project but these guys are usually windows based. So no access to DL for them. I suppose this is where browser based tools become really useful

What would be timesaving is if we could give them visibility and they could do their own updates. The MC team suggested using DL delivery, which would be good. I am just now trying to work out how to get them to provide an update to the tasks they have completed, appreciate any thoughts

Ditto here. I've not yet used the pipeline and activity sets (we've been in retail cosmetics sales to individuals for years so didn't need a complex system) but now are diversifying into other fields, including selling some big-ticket items, some B to B sales, etc where good project-management systems will be needed. Linking Activity Sets to Pipelines would be very useful to us I am sure so I hope DL comes to support that.

I would say Pipelines would work well too. I know that whenever I make an activity set they end up being too similar to pipelines I already use for t hem to be more advantageous.

Sean Carter

quote:

Agreed ... not being able to work with activity sets as entities assigned to each pipeline stage sort of sucks.

I tried to setup something similar to what Andrew was doing with the subtasks so I could have a hierarchical view based on activity sets for each stage of the pipeline. Then I tried to do the same thing with the appointments pane and it didn't work out.

I'm thinking that maybe I should just model activity sets using (sub-)tasks in the Tasks and Appointment views and then drag/drop the subtasks and appointments to the pipeline view. This just seems way too convoluted and labor intensive; it's almost counterproductive to use pipelines to manage the projects for my floor company. I'm sure that like most other small business owners the big question is what happens when I actually have to teach someone else how to do this?

Exactly what I have been saying. If the process is too complicated and you can't enforce it then you it won't be used.

It has been over a year (and for some multiple years) and nothing has been done to address this issue.

Hell I would be happy just to be able to associate an activity set to each stage of a pipeline and have a button to allow us to create the set when the stage changes.

As a former programmer this does not seem too difficult to do. Each pipeline stage has a reference to an activity set to create.

This is again another reason why we are sticking with SugarCRM internally. We can make changes to the open source system while waiting for the features to be implemented or merged into the trunk of the project.