New to saleforce.com - and I have some questions for the more experienced admins.

[Ev]

We use the standard Account and Contact objects in our business (B2B).  Our accounts close from time to time or are acquired by other entities, so we create a new acount for them. We want to "deactivate" these accounts, so that they cannot be used in any new activities, but history is still visible for the account owner. 

Also, from time to time, our contacts move on, and our account owners want to deactivate the contact.  As with the deactivated accounts, we want to not allow the user to use the contact for any new activities, but see past history. 

[Stevemo · Accepted solution]

We've created custom fields, and visual indicators to display the status of Accounts, Contacts, and Opportunities on our Org. 

Depending on how comfy you are with writing Apex Code, you could probably take it a step futher, and write a trigger that evaluates the status of those fields, and throws and error if a user tries to create an Activity in an Account or Contact (WhoID) that is dead.  

[Ev]

I like the trigger idea.  I'm going to test it out right now.

Thanks for sharing...

[Stevemo]

That's why they pay me the BIG BUCKS!