Timelines: shared conversations, private notes

A record’s timeline shows what happened on it, and also what happened on records linked to it - open a deal, see the emails with the people on it. That was running in both directions for everything, and it shouldn’t have been.

Two things changed

Only correspondence travels now. Emails, calls, meetings, social messages and form submissions move between linked records, because they record something that actually happened with someone - as true read from the deal as from the person. Notes and tasks stay where you wrote them. “Chase the revised quote” is a fact about the deal; on someone’s contact record it turned their history into a to-do list. If you want a note in both places, link it to both - that still works and now means something.

And you never see a conversation that was someone else’s. Say a deal has two people on it, Jane and Bob. You email Bob about pricing - that was appearing on Jane’s timeline too, a conversation she was never part of. It double-counted activity in reporting, over-shared if anyone asked what you held about her, and the first time a rep spots something like that they start double-checking everything, which is the opposite of what a timeline is for.

It works whatever you call your records

Neither rule looks for “contacts” or “deals”. The second one asks whether an activity already belongs to another record of the kind you’re looking at - so two jobs that share a customer never show each other’s history, and neither do two applications for the same person, without anyone setting that up.

One switch, not a puzzle

If you don’t want two kinds of record sharing their history at all, there’s a single tick per link under Settings → Objects → Shared history, on by default. An earlier version of this had a switch for each direction; once notes and tasks stopped travelling there was nothing left for a direction to disagree about, so it’s one plain sentence instead.

Two more

• New record types now come with a timeline switched on. Whether you got one used to depend on how the record type was created - and the AI setup, which is how most workspaces get built, was one of the ways that didn’t. Turn it off in Settings for things like products or locations where it isn’t wanted.
• A record with a very large number of links now says so. The timeline gathers from as many as it sensibly can; before, it quietly stopped at a limit, so a partial picture looked exactly like the whole one.