Inherit Contact and Organization Fields

With certain task types, you can set the organization field, the contact field, or both to inherit those field values from the associated record.

When you add or edit an opportunity or incident task type, you can set the organization and contact fields to inherit those fields from the opportunity or incident. And when you add or edit a contact task type, you can set the organization field to inherit the organization associated with the contact.

When the task contact, organization, or both are tied to the associated record through the Inherit property, you can ensure that the fields are the same for both the task and the record. An additional benefit is the simplicity of completing those task fields.

This procedure sets contact and organization fields to Inherit for an incidents task type. The procedure is the same for opportunity and contact task types.

1. Open a task.
2. Click the Task Type drop-down list and select Incidents.
   The Incident field label turns red and includes an asterisk, indicating that it is now a required field. An Inherit button appears to the right of the Organization and Contact fields.
3. Select the incident you want to associate with the task.
4. Click Search for the Incident field.
5. Enter your search criteria in the search fields.
6. Click Search.
7. Select the incident you want from the list of search results.
8. Click Select.
   The Incident Search window closes and the incident appears in the Incident field of the task. If only one incident matches the search criteria, the Incident field is automatically populated.
9. Click Inherit to the right of the Contact field.
   The Inherit button changes to Contact Locked (with a lock symbol) indicating the Inherit property is active, the value in the Contact field changes to the contact for the incident, and the field is disabled and appears grayed out.
10. Click Inherit to the right of the Organization field.

    The Inherit button changes to Organization Locked (with a lock symbol) indicating the Inherit property is active, the value in the Organization field changes to the organization for the incident, and the field is disabled and appears grayed out.

    If the incident does not have an organization, the field is locked anyway. If you later add an organization to the incident, the task Organization field contains the same organization value as the incident.

11. To unlock the inheritance, click Locked to the right of the Contact or Organization field.
    The value in the field remains the same, but the field is enabled and you can change the value now that the Inherit property is no longer active.