In our Monday account, we have multiple workspaces, for multiple divisions of our company. All those divisions are using the CRM-product and use the e-mails and activities widget on several of their boards.
Sadly, this brings forth a couple of problems with how the (custom) activities can be set up currently:
-
Everyone can make custom activity types
This can cause a lot of bloat in the activity type list when users want to create a new activity. -
(Custom) activities cannot be reordered
See also: Ability to order activity types in the emails & activities widget.
If you create a new activity type, it will always be at the bottom of the list. Good luck restoring something to how it was originally if someone accidentally deleted a custom activity type! Speaking of… -
Everyone can delete custom activity types
Accidents happen and people don’t always realise that the activities are shared across the entire account. This can cause people to accidentally delete custom activity types that other people use.
Because anyone can make them, it should be easy to restore, but achieving consistency is tough when anyone can make and delete them on a moments notice… It also can affect your automations: -
Automations on specific custom activity types can be broken by deleting a custom activity type
There’s an automation which can trigger when people create an activity of a specific type. First of all: You cannot choose all the default activity types and second of all, if you set it to a custom activity type and that one gets accidentally deleted, you will always have to adjust the automation to refer to the replacement you have to create.
Even if the newly created activity type is setup in the exact same way (same name, color and icon). -
Automations set to trigger when any activity is created, do not trigger on all of the default/essential activities (like: Note and E-mails)
If someone creates a new Note activity and you have an automation set up to create an item in another board for every activity created (implemented by default on new CRM board setups within Monday), it will not create an item for that activity.
While this might be done on purpose to prevent item bloat, this is not clear from the automation itself. It is documented (Support.monday.com: Emails & Activities: manage your activities), but I would like to decide what I want to share to other boards myself. Especially combined with: -
Default/essential activity types cannot be disabled/removed from the activity type list
For example: We wanted to log notes as an item in a different board as well, so we made a custom Activity for it called NOTE! Great! But the default Note activity type is still there, all the way on the top! Guess which one people still select most often. The default/essential Note activity on top or the newly created custom activity somewhere down the list of many custom activities?
Second of all, maybe not everyone wants to log meetings or notes within Monday. -
Activity types are shared across boards, but more importantly, across workspaces
While this sounds handy, this also means that the list of custom activity types available to the users can contain irrelevant custom activity types. Combined with the fact that anyone can make and delete all the shared activities… Makes managing this a massive headache.
Possible solutions:
- Permissions for creating and deleting custom activities.
- Ability to set up activities per board (or at least per workspace).
- Ability to disable default/essential activity types for admins
- Ability to reorder activity types (preferably behind a permission)
- Ability to restore deleted custom activity types (especially if they have been used in the past)
- Ability to select all (essential & custom) activity types in automations (maybe a new option called “all”, but I get that this would be confusing next to “Any”)