“I am going to tweak our SageCRM to allow recurring tasks”, I told my boss. This was soon after our meeting where a task was assigned to me which and needed to be done every week. We knew that SageCRM does not allow recurring tasks like it does for recurring appointments. I took up the challenge.
Not surprisingly my boss clenched his fists, closed his eyes and looked up a sign he always does when he senses impending danger. “Look son”, he said with a soothing voice and sense of calmness that one normally associates with a 100 year old wise hermit living in far off mountains, “I have better things in my mind which you can look into. You can leave the internal SageCRM alone for now.”. I recollect I had made a similar announcement almost 5 years ago and told my boss that I have designed a customization that will change everyone life and ended up messing our SageCRM security profiles. I don’t know about others but it sure did change my life cause I had to spend the next 2 days and nights correcting and undoing what my innovation had did. But that was 6 years ago when I was raw. But now I had learnt from my mistakes. I guess this incident must have flashed in my boss’s mind. He tried his best to cajole me out but I would have none of it. So I got an approval after I convinced him that I would demo the solution to him before moving out to the production system.
So I got down doing the task. It was not very difficult as the solution was already ready in my head. I had to put in a new button on the communication screen and call it “Set Recurrence”. On the click of the button I made sure that I initiated the standard SageCRM recurrence panel. There were two major advantages for this approach. First being that if I initiated the standard recurrence screen then I will not need to design it on my own and the second most important being it will take care of saving the data in SageCRM on its own and at the right table and fields. So basically I will be initiating the same process on the tasks that SageCRM does for appointments. I made sure that that all the hyperlinks on this screen took the user where they are supposed to take them and the data is saved correctly and accurately. Felt good and confident.
I demoed the modification to my boss and he too looked convinced. I moved it to our SageCRM the same day. Guess what I was the first one to be assigned the recurring task and since then I find myself doing the same work every week, same work every week, same work every week…oh Gosh!!!! I guess it’s the recurrence effect.