We're trying to tag all activities to both the account and contact they involve, so as not to rely on the contact to account activity rollup (since this doesn't work to keep a good activity history when they leave the company and go somewhere else, etc...). So I thought, hey, if we just go through all contacts added to an activity, and suggest/add their primary account as determined in our Connections list (and/or custom N:N relationship, still pondering that) , then that way it'll get tagged both places and all is well! Sadly, while this seemed a simple idea I'm running into a bunch of barriers.
1. The appointment activity only has Required Attendees and Optional Attendees fields for party lists. This means I can't have some sort of "Additional Attendees" custom field to hold these additional tagged accounts.
2. If both the account and the contact get added in the attendee fields, then they'll both get invites in Outlook (when really only one invite should be going out).
3. I figured I could just change the descriptions for Required Attendees to be Attendees (invite in Outlook), and Optional to be Attendees (track only), and then not sync the Optional Attendees field. Sadly, that sync apparently cannot be altered.
4. If I make a custom activity for these, we lose the ability to track/send invites in Outlook completely.
5. I thought about making a custom activity that then also creates an appointment based on the accounts/contacts in the "invite in Outlook" field, but then there's a lot of duplication that has to be hidden/synced/etc...
Are there any other options here? I keep thinking I've found a workaround, and it keeps being blocked. :-( I think I could theoretically make a transport rule in Outlook that keeps optional attendees from getting invites, but it's also quite a bit less than ideal since it has no visibility from the CRM admin side (so really has maintenance risks down the road). Also, I feel like there might be weird implications if people made changes in Outlook, but I haven't pinned down quite what that would look like. I'd love to just add a party list to the Appointment, or force a custom activity to sync to Outlook, but the former has been made completely impossible (I even tried through XML modification, just as a test), and I haven't got a clue if the latter is possible but I'm guessing not since I haven't seen any reference to anyone doing it successfully.