John,

I am considering purchasing your new calendar app to use in a solution I'm building.

In my solution, I have set up several fields that automatically generate a date (these are follow up dates, based on certain types of follow up...letter, phone call, etc.) based on one manually entered date (say, date we receive lead). I'm assuming it won't be too difficult to link these fields to fields in the calendar file so all the dates will show up on the calendar automatically, and I can categorize each of events based on the associated field (letter 1, letter 2, phone call 1, phone call 2, door knock 1, door knock 2, etc...).

What are your thoughts on this?

Thanks in advance.

It sounds like all your dates (letter 1, letter 2, phone call 1, phone call 2) are in one record now. Ideally, when you add the calendar to your system, you'd use a script to create all these dates *in* the calendar's appointments table and relate those records to your current main record (likely a prospect or customer record). This kind of structure would allow for many appointment or milestone records per prospect or customer record.

Of course, you can leave the dates in your record and point the calendar at your file instead of at our appointments file (CC Calendar actually comes with instructions to do this) but there are a few good reasons not to:

For one, it is more work to swap out the appointments file in this way. Secondly, while your item would show up in the calendar on each of your various dates, it would show up *the same way* on each of those dates. Using separate records for each date lets you label each with the activity name like "door knock 1" etc.

To relate our appointments file to your contact or prospect record, you'd add a field in our appointments table for the ID from your record. You can refer to this post in our support forum for step-by-step instructions for setting up this kind of link.


Going Further...

Normally, these appointments (now related to your contact or prospect record) would show up both in the calendar and in a portal on your contact's or prospect's record. Such a portal lets you see all the relevant appointments or milestones for each prospect.

However, if you already have a layout you like where you're entering these dates in your contact or prospect record, you can still use related appointment records without changing the look of your existing layout. For each significant date, you'd create a relationship to the appointments file that is only true for that contact AND that appointment type. Turn on "Allow the creation of related records" for this relationship and place the related Appointment Date field on your layout in place of the date field you have there now. With this in place, typing a date into one of these fields will create a related appointment record of the correct "type" for that contact or prospect record. (That is described in kind of broad strokes. If you want to go into that further, let me know.)

Hope that helps,

John