Meeting Notes in Description or Note?

I may say that field Description is intended for the subject of the meeting.

Some customers had asked to add a custom text area field which would get description of all related notes so users can easily preview the historical data of meetings, which definitely fits your very question.

Feeding such custom field may be triggered by a combination of sugarLogic formula and SugarBPM process.

No matter how Writers and External Systems got used to provide the descriptions to key events - all of key events to be collected on the TimeLine for the sake of Readers' fast and comfortable observation from historical perspective and in nessesary contexts, e. g. Accounts and Contacts -  per record or per filtered group of records.

If the Writer has not explicitly set relation that enable key event description for the  Reader  (have you seen Writers that always care of Readers?) , e. g. the Meeting held is related to  the Opp instead of  Account, that case might be and should be processed by properly configured top-level CRM - allowing Readers to observe description on the Accounts TimeLine - for the Account to which the Opp belongs to.

CRM adoption by Readers is possible without  restricting Writers' way of working  - just let TimeLine Viewer do the work and, if nessesary, extend a list of  events collected with custom ones - with configuring. 

To keep it simple: The description of a meeting is added to the invitation when you click on the "Save and Send invites" button.

So, when you add your meeting notes to the description you should always have in mind that a single click can send these notes to the invited persons.

That's the reason why many companies use additional notes for the meeting notes.

We don't schedule from Sugar, only Outlook, but I could see someone accidentally creating a meeting and sending invites.

In case you haven't seen it yet, this release note was included for Sugar 11.2 (Q4 2021): 

• Improved usability for calls and meetings: A new field, "Internal Notes", has been added to the record view for calls and meetings. Internal Notes are only visible to internal Sugar users. The Description field has been renamed "Invitation Body" to clarify that its contents are visible to all internal and external invited guests.

That might be a good place to have your salespeople enter notes in order to avoid accidentally sending those internal notes to participants. 

IMHO, the question to CRM as to software technology is hardly about if some notes are internal or external - there is always a human factor.
The question is how to use notes and generally key history collected by the whole team for the sake of knowing the customer better and improving company-to-customer relationships based on that knowledge.
Therefore storing data in a way it could be retrieved and analyzed fast - that is the main challenge that CRM software should solve for companies.
Keeping meeting outcomes as the multiline note is truly quick and a handful for the writer, however, it helps with companies' challenge of collecting and employing key customer info no more than old-school meeting notes saved on the paper sheets.
Literally, putting paper sheets to the monitors' screens is hard to be considered as the next level of doing business.
It should rather be employing capabilities of data management that modern software provides - e.g. for recognizing and tagging the key info collected in a call

AWS allows doing that and we employ its capabilities in Sugar for our customers already - and thanks to Sugar platform openness in its DNA - no code

I hope this makes sense

Lydia Manger said:

"Invitation Body"

That sounds like it was decided by developer, because I think a User would prefer 'Invitation Text'  maybe?

We use the Comment Log in the various modules for anything that is internal and that way any fields such as this that can accidentally be visible by the customer either via an email, portal or otherwise are known to be external. Given there is a comment log not sure why this Internal Note etc field renaming was done.

We have separately suggested some minor improvements to the Comment Log as it is unforgiving with typos.

In this case, the existing field was renamed and the new one added just to avoid any confusion or mistakes. Sending internal notes to the external participants by accident can be quite unfortunate sometimes. I agree that the Comment Log field is ideal for this but I think the idea was just to reduce the risk of errors. And I also know what you mean about its unforgiving nature.

-Brenda