Is clearing activities required?

[patvaughn]

We have 8 users on Act 2012 Premium, after upgrading last year from Act 2008 Premium.  We use the system extensively, with thousands of shared contacts and thousands of activites entered over the years.  We have never cleared our activities, they remain in the calendar and under the Activities tab for each contact.

Is there any compelling reason to clear these activities after their time has passed?  It crosses them out on the calendar and moves the information to the History tab, which tends to get cluttered over time with all emails and calls there as well.  We've historically been able to check the Activities tab to see if any meetings have taken place with a contact.

We back up our database nightly and reindex weekly, and have had no issues.

Thanks -

Patrick

[GLComputing]

Huge numbers of activities can cause performance issues over time, which is why they are best cleared.

[ghollister]

I agree with Mike - a large number of old, uncleared Activities can slow down activity-related functions and has been known to cause corruption in the Activities table. in addition, not clearing them means they will never show on any contact or user history report. A couple of options:

- If you don't like the strikeout, you can go to your scheduling preferences and change the cleared activities to display as gray instead
- You can deselect the "Show Cleared" option from the Calendar, Task List, or Activities tab to hide cleared activities
- Under the History tab, use the Types filter to not display Activities histories

[patvaughn]

Thanks for the feedback.  Is there a way to have activites clear automatically, or to clear all activities older than a certain date?

[ghollister]

There is not a way to clear them automatically, but you can clear multiple activities from the Task List by selecting a group of activities, right-clicking on them, and selecting "Clear Multiple Activities"

[ghollister]

Here's another handy little activity tool - it's free
http://exponenciel.com/actaddons/actaddon.aspx?ID=136