Form Social Panes and Posts in Dynamics CRM: Part 2

Last time we discussed how the Posts portion of the social pane is configured and the functionality behind it, specifically for out of the box (OOTB) entities. In this post, I would like to discuss how we can extend the OOTB functionality to create additional custom posts.

In this example we will discuss adding an additional post for the ‘Contact’ entity. The only original system post in regards to contacts in that when a new contact is created, a post is generated for that contact on the contact form social pane, which needless to say is pretty useless (I think I will go ahead and follow the steps in part 1 and deactivate that particular Post Config Rule).

What WOULD be a useful post in regards to contacts would be to create a post on the Account social pane each time a new contact is associated to that account. To do this, we will need to turn to workflows.

HOW TO CREATE CUSTOM POSTS VIA WORKFLOW:

• Create a new workflow process for the contact entity

• Select ‘Records field change’ as the Start when:, and set the ‘Company Name’ field (parentcustomerid) as your trigger field
• So that we won’t have any failing workflow jobs, the first step to add to the workflow logic will be a conditions check to make sure the ‘Company Name’ field contains data

• Once the workflow ensures that there is an associated Account record for us to Post to, we will simply create a Post record, and set the regarding of the post as the Account

The above workflow method can be recreated for any action within your CRM system. While there may not be too many instances where you feel the need to extend the posts functionality for the system entities, these workflows can come in handy when wanting to create posts for custom entities.

In part 3, and sadly the final part, of this series, we will go over utilizing posts to generate tasks!

by Hitachi Solutions America

Form Social Panes and Posts in Dynamics CRM: Part 2 is a post from: CRM Software Blog

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