Let your business take a day off
Published: November 3, 2006
Holidays, special meetings, inventory and maintenance closures can cause chaos with your schedule. You can block off at the same time the schedule of everyone in your organization who provides services so that when a user searches for an available service activity in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, no service activities for that period are returned. You can still manually create an appointment or service activity, but you will receive a warning.
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Turn on the Observe option for existing users
When new users are created, their work schedule is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and the schedule is set up to ignore business closures. Before you can use business closures, you must set up the users who have work schedules to observe business closures.
1. | In the Navigation Pane, click Settings. |
2. | Under Settings, click Settings, and then in the Settings area, click Business Unit Settings. Then, click Users. |
3. | In the list, open the user’s record you want modify. |
4. | Under Details, click Work Hours. |
5. | On the Monthly View tab, double-click a date on the calendar that is the first day you want future business closures to take effect. |
6. | In the Edit Weekly Schedule dialog box, select From <this date> onward, and then click OK.
This option changes only the schedule going forward. |
7. | In the Weekly Schedule dialog box, select Observe. |
8. | Click Save or Save and Close. |
Once this option is set to Observe, business closures are displayed in the user’s work schedule.
Business closures also appear on the Service Calendar as time during which the user should not be scheduled for any appointments or service activities. However, business closures do not appear on the Workplace calendar.
Set business closures
You can set business closures at any time. If appointments or service activities have already been scheduled, they will not be changed. However, you can use the Show Conflicts button on the Service Calendar to highlight appointments and service activities that have scheduling conflicts.
1. | In the Navigation Pane, click Settings. |
2. | Under Settings, click Settings, and then in the Settings area, click Business Closures. |
3. | On the Actions toolbar, click New. |
4. | In the Schedule a Business Closure dialog box, in the Name box, type a name.
The first 12 characters of the name appear on each day of the closure on the calendar view of the affected resource's Work Hours. |
5. | In the Start Time and End Time boxes, enter the start dates and the end dates for the closure. |
6. | | • | If you want to enter a duration instead of an end time, select the length of the closure in the Duration box. Microsoft CRM automatically calculates the end time for you. | | • | If the closure is an all day event, select the All Day check box. Microsoft CRM automatically enters a duration of 1 day. | | • | If you want to enter a specific time period, clear the All Day check box. Two lists will appear. Use these lists to set the hours during which your organization will be closed. | | • | To save this business closure, click OK. |
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Best practices
The Observe option cannot be set for all users at the same time. As a best practice, as you create new work schedules for users, select the Observe option. You can then set a single business closure for the all users who have a work schedule. If you have several people who will be working during that business closure, you can update their schedule for that day to ignore the business closure so that appointments and service activities can be scheduled for these people.
You can manage your facilities and equipment separately from the users. Like user records, the Do not observe option in the facility/equipment record is set when the record is created. By not changing this option, you can ensures that facilities and equipment are always available for scheduling. Usually, most service activities require a combination of users and facilities/equipment in order to be scheduled. Therefore, the facilities or equipment will not be scheduled without an available user.
