We are in the discovery phase of what we need to account for when adding the Activity Logs to Custom Reporting. We purposely did not expose the logs in reporting because they can be full HTML and it would not be symmetrically presented in the report results grid.

This forum is to gauge the need of full HTML in your activity logs.

As it stands today if we were merely add the Activity Logs to reporting the results would render the log exactly as the HTML exists. For example, I made this mockup to show that based on the current height of the report results grid, you would be scrolling more and have more pages just due to the height of the log notes. I only see two entries and I have to scroll to view the remaining items.

 

As I continue to scroll I may see a few more or even a single entry more because of the size of the HTML.

We can remove the max height that is currently restricting the height of the report results grid. It would be something similar to this:

 

We do not want to remove all of the HTML from the notes and then display it because it would not look right nor would it be easily readable as text would not have proper spacing, etc.  Currently, you can export activity logs from another part of the site and we do export the complete HTML in the notes field.

• Is the HTML markup an important part of the activity log for your organization?
  

• Is this OK for displaying in the reporting module?

• What about the activity log do you need in the output rather an export or a printed PDF? 

• Is this used as validation of member actions, etc?
  

Finally, what if we were to leave existing activity logs as they are and display them as they are but remove the WYSIWYG editor when creating new logs and only allow the notes to be plain text?  Would this cause undue business pains for you and your organization?

Thanks for your time and expertise in how you are utilizing activity logs. I welcome any and all feedback. If you prefer email contact feel free to send your feedback directly to me at bweaver@yourmembership.com. I encourage you to share your thoughts on this forum so your fellow site admins can get an understanding of how you use this feature. Who knows, if may give them a use case to start creating activity logs.

In case these embedded images are too small for viewing on your device I have attached to PNG files.

Regards,

Brian Weaver

YOUR Product Manager

I don't have much of an opinion as to the impact of mark-up in this.

I do, however, find the module doesn't include some basic information I'd like to see recorded. For example, I'd like to know:

1) When and to whom sub-account invitations are sent.
2) When one of our staff uses "the sign-in as member" to access the account.

There are likely several things I am forgetting.

We use the activity log currently to document the instances that our members (particularly County Commissioners) come to visit our office. We enter the date and time, and the reason for their visit. Every so often our Executive Director will ask us to pull are report based on that Activity Log Category (FAC Office Visits).

However when you download the log, while you see the website ID and name of the member, there are no other qualifiers to their identity - such as their position (which may be Commissioner, Council Member or Mayor - depending on which county they serve in), and the name of their organization. I would also be nice if their contact information was also there but they are not.

So what I have been doing to fill in the blanks for those columns is to download a master file of the database (currently at 7942 records) - then use VLOOKUP (using Website ID as the key) to find the data stored in the columns I request - in this case those would be Professional Title, Employer Name, Email Address and Employer Phone.

Like Mr. Meyer over here I am not entirely sure how HTML markup would impact the view so much, but in my case, I really don't care to know what the reasons are for there visit (I do care that I should be able to see it in the results page, even if I cannot read the entire thing - that's what the Excel download is for - so YES I need an export and YES I need a results page) - just care that it is pulling correctly and with the additional information I need. So having the activity log as one of the buckets in the Custom Reporting tool is a godsend.

Down the road we wish to use the activity log to document other activities - like sales calls/visits, etc. - in absence of a true CRM component. I know y'all integrate with Salesforce.com but that is not in the cards right now, unfortunately.

Hope this helps.

We sometimes copy and paste from a member's email into the activity log, so I'm sure we have some HTML in ours. If we needed to be more disciplined about using plain text, we could be.

For me, having the fields available in the existing Activity Log export available in custom reporting would be sufficient. I would probably be looking for something like all records with an activity log entry in a specific category, over a specific time period.

Somewhat related, if admin entries to the "Internal Comments" on a member's profile were automatically added to the Activity Log, it would save a step in adding comments in both places. We generally use the Internal Comments field for "permanent" comments that we want to highlight for anyone working in the database.

We use the activity log as CRM for our members. We log every member touch. Phone call, email, request and response. The info as mocked up looks fine. I would like every admin action, update, etc to be recorded there. In a perfect world, manual entries would not be editable by admin after submission unless a permission was enabled ie they had supervisor/manager rights via the admin permissions options.