CRM 2011: Regarding not passed for Activity Sub-Grids

One of the great improvements of CRM 2011 is the ability to very quickly and easily embed sub-grids into a parent entity. However I came across an issue with regards to the activity sub-grids i.e. tasks, emails, faxes, phone calls, appointments, etc. with regards to context sensitivity.

For example, you can embed the Phone Calls sub-grid into an account entity as follows:

However, when you want to subsequently add a new phone call to the account by clicking on the sub-grid and clicking "Add New Phone Call", you would expect that the "Regarding" on the resulting phone call form would be defaulted to the account record (or whichever the parent record is) from where you navigated. After all, this is not only common sense but also how it works for every other "Related Regarding" sub-grid (at least all cases that I tried other than the aforementioned activity sub-grids). You might expect this behavior... but unfortunately you will be disappointed in this case.

Conversely, if you add an activity via one of the other form workarounds (i.e. default methods of adding an activity), the regarding is passed through. Which is all well and good, but all those approaches involve a few additional clicks not to mention that when you have an embedded sub-grid the workflow shown in the screenshot above is the most logical one to be following.

It should also be pointed out that embedding the activities as a sub-grid is the only way to have direct access to the specific activity type rather than having them co-mingled under the more generic "Activities" link. That is, the ability to add the "Phone Calls" (using the above example) to the left hand navigation links is not supported and therefore is not an alternative solution for this predicament.

I opened a ticket with Microsoft support to troubleshoot this issue and although this issue is acknowledged it seems the development team has not yet prioritized this for fixing. So it seems for the time being, we just need to live with this oversight and use one of the workarounds available i.e.:

• Activities | Add New Activity | Phone Call
• Add | Phone Call

Or... if the additional clicks is something that you'd prefer not to live with you can always move the activity buttons on the ribbon to the main tab.