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Account, Contact and Opportunity Discussions

Email is the easiest way to communicate with your team, but it's also too easy to lose context. Either the message gets lost in your inbox, or you have the message but not the context. Associating emails with Salesforce records is a good way to work around this issue, but what if we integrated Discussions more directly?

Not only would it be easier to keep your notes organized for the deal at hand, but you're also automatically building a knowledge archive for the next deal. Searching and reusing that expertise could potentially shorten sales cycles.

What are your thoughts around embedding discussions right in the context of an Account, Contact or Opportunity?

peterleesfdc Jul 23	Changed status to Ideas Under Consideration.
TimAlsop Jul 23	yes, if the email support in the salesforce product was better it would be possible to include discussion with a prospect/client inside salesforce, instead of outside where others cannot benefit.
happygirl Aug 7	I suggested the same function as Case Comments on ALL object to keep track of everything, I think this is similiar to your idea. I love Case Comments
happygirl Aug 7	I suggested the same function as Case Comments on ALL object to keep track of everything, I think this is similiar to your idea. I love Case Comments
happygirl Aug 7	I suggested the same function as Case Comments on ALL object to keep track of everything, I think this is similiar to your idea. I love Case Comments
happygirl Sep 22	Salesforce - is this happening and how are you considering executing?
peterleesfdc Sep 26	Hey happygirl. So to the "is it happening" question, we're still in the exploration phase. It's really good to get your feedback -- and thanks for pointing me to the other Idea -- I'll merge them together. So a few things I've been thinking about: one thing that's nice about Case Comments is that it's directed: the point of the discussion is to close the case. And you could make the same argument about Ideas: the point of the discussion is to suss out a product idea and figure out whether and where we should put it into the product roadmap. I'm wondering if all discussions are like that (in the sense that they have goals)and if so, what are the different types of goals they could have: - Case Closed - Feature Released - Product Question Answered - Customer Reference Found - Subject Matter Expert Located - etc. Can you think of others? Or maybe I can ask the question the other way: do you ever run into situations where discussions are "undirected?" (Also, do you guys use Twitter / Yammer?)
TimAlsop Sep 26	Sometimes a discussion can be related to the description of the idea, and people are asking questions to further their understanding of the requirement. Somtimes it turns out that the idea has already been implemented, and the person who started the idea/thread/discussion was not aware of functionality already available.
happygirl Sep 26	Well you may or may not like my answer to your question. I do think under Comments you are left with maybe "undirected" items that should be tasks/events, etc. Obviously for some discussions or comments you should be using another part of the application such as solutions or ideas. However, I look at Comments/Discussions as weekly updates what is the "temperature" of that specific item such as if it is a "Case" what happened, or internally if you called Service what did they have to say so everyone in the company can understand the Account, Case, etc. better. Since the Notes, Tasks and Events section work so independently of each other it is so hard to get a complete history of the account including "Comments". For example, I have trained my reps to use tasks and write comments but that failed because there is no nice view that shows comments because you can cut and past whole emails in there, etc. So it is not an easy way to give updates and running dialog or messaging. Plus reports on recent comments via tasks are impossible because you can not touch Due Date to ensure it is not future! Overall, I think this area is somewhat limited meaning - Tasks-Events, Notes, Attachments and Comments.... It is to broken out and very limited when it comes to reporting. If I was a PM I would maybe keep them as related lists but somehow have them (1) Function with one centralized theme "Comments" so you could report on tasks with comments, events with comments, comments with no related activity per say "discussion" and attachments with comments. Then be able to not only tally all of that but get a true last touch date, not a future date. I would not have "notes" in there at all, I would replace with Comments.
happygirl Sep 26	No what is Twitter/Yammer? I think I am asking to much!! But based on everyone's posts here and my business experience I think it is really hard to manage your Accounts or Contacts for that matter using Salesforce because of the reporting capabilities. I have to download via Excel.
meagan_cantrell Oct 14	If you implement discussions PLEASE do not restrict them to SFA objects. It should be a global feature which can be enabled for any object! Us platform developers are always being left out :)

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