What do Action Heroes and Bumblebees Have in Common?

29 Apr 2014

Do you ever reach a point in a conversation where you can’t remember how exactly you got on that topic? You started out talking about the latest blockbuster you watched the night before and before you know if, you’ve ended up talking about the effect of pollution on bumblebees. Where did that come from? How did we get here?

Sometimes it is possible to retrace the steps of your conversation and other times…well, it’s just lost forever. Gone to the sea of no more.

This same kind of thing can happen so easily in email exchanges, over the course of a project, or even during the sales process. In circumstances like these, being able to retrace your steps isn’t just an amusing diversion, it can have some serious implications for the end result.

With an email exchange all you have to do is read through the email thread or, if the thread is only partial, you could always go to that individual’s record in OpenCRM and have a look through the attached emails.

With an ongoing project or sales process, however, recreating a timeline of changes can be slightly more difficult. One feature in OpenCRM that can be useful in reconstructing a series of events is the Audit Log.

The Audit Log in OpenCRM can either be used in a couple of different ways.

The first would be on an individual record by clicking the “Audit” link in the top right corner of the record you’re interested in. This will display any changes to that individual record. (There is also a global audit trail that you can use.) 

The second is to Report on the Audit Log. You can use this feature, for example, to show you the various actions a specific user has taken in a specific module or to do the same to show you a user’s changes to an individual record.

So for the examples I mentioned early, you could show all the changes a particular user made on a particular Opportunity to recreate the series of events that led to where you are now. You could also use it to measure the average amount of time it takes your sales team to close their Opportunities or for your project managers to finalise their projects.

At the end of the day, the Audit Log feature can help you work out the journey you’ve taken to get from Point A to Point B. In terms of figuring out how you started talking about a film and ended up talking about bumblebees…I’m afraid I can’t help you.