Overview of Appointments and Tasks

You can create tasks and appointments related to individual accounts, contacts, leads, and opportunities. And you can create stand-alone tasks and appointments. Collectively called "activities", tasks and appointments can be in-person meetings, web conferences, calls, demonstrations, events, and so on. Key difference is that tasks have a due date and a completion status, while appointments are scheduled for specific dates and times. You assign tasks to sales organization resources to carry out. You can schedule appointments with both internal resources and contacts.

Here are a few things you should know:

You can create and manage tasks and appointments from the Activities work area or in the context of an individual account, contact, lead, or opportunity.
Your pending and overdue tasks are also visible and accessible in the Sales Dashboard.
Tasks and appointments are listed in activities for all associated records. For example, if you create an appointment for a contact from an account, then that task is visible in both the account list of activities and contact list of activities.
If you create a task or appointment in a record, it automatically shows up in the list of activities for that record. For example, if you create a task from a lead, it shows up in the Activities list for that lead. If you create the same task from the Activities work area, you must manually associate the lead to the task yourself.
You can edit the appointment or task from any record where it’s visible or from the Activities work area. Editing it in one place is the same as editing it in another.
While editing an appointment or task, you can attach documents.
If you want to create a stand-alone task or appointment for yourself and your team without associating it to any record, create it from the home page or from the Activities work area.
Stand-alone tasks and appointments are visible only in the Activities work area and in the Sales Dashboard. Only you and other resources you added can see them.
All salespeople who can access a record, can view the tasks and appointments you associate to that record whether or not you specifically add them as resources. However, only resources you add receive notifications and only the resources and sales administrators can edit the tasks and appointments.
The salespeople you add as resources, can view appointments and tasks in their My Open Activities list provided by Oracle in the Activities work area.
The resources you add to a task or appointment get automatically notified using the Notifications (bell icon) feature and email.
Salespeople added to a task or an appointment can set a reminder before a task is due or before the appointment takes place. Each person can specify if and when they want to be reminded. Reminders come in through the Notifications feature and email.
You can take actions on a task or an appointment without having to drill into it. For example, you can call a contact on a task by selecting Call. If there's only one contact associated to the task, the call dials directly. If multiple contacts are associated, you can choose which one to call. Notes you take on the call while it's in progress get saved with the task.

Here are a few things to understand about tasks specifically:

Typically, it’s the owner of the task that’s responsible for completing the task and setting its status to Complete. Change the due date of an overdue task to the date you complete it to have the completion date reflected in the task.
If a task is overdue, then all associated resources see that task on their list of overdue tasks in the Activities work area and in the Sales Dashboard. Your sales administrator can change this default, of course, to just show overdue tasks to the task owner, for example.
When you create a task, you become its owner automatically. However, you can create a task for someone else by adding a resource and then switching task ownership to that resource. See the topic Reassign Task Ownership to Someone Else.

And a few specifics about appointments:

You can create an appointment for multiple contacts at the same time and invite multiple resources. Each person you add to the appointment is notified. Customer contacts receive automatic email notifications. The salespeople you add as resources to the appointment get invited both through the Notifications feature (the bell icon) and by email.
Resources can accept or decline the invitation from the appointment itself. Their responses show up next to their names in the appointment.
There's no group calendar for appointments. Your organization must keep a separate group calendar so you know who is available when you create an appointment. Appointments in Digital Sales aren't synchronized automatically with Outlook calendars or other calendars.