Adding all Staff to the CRM and not just the CRM Users

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I am running CRM4 with 45 users within a company of 1,200 people. When we set up meetings we often want to invite both our Contacts and internal staff. The only way I have found to do this is to add our staff as Contacts. Can anybody suggest a better way?

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moko33 1,788 on at

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RE: Adding all Staff to the CRM and not just the CRM Users

If somebody still has this decision to make, (s)he might want to read this: community.dynamics.com/.../316744

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GL-23071537-0 on at

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RE: Adding all Staff to the CRM and not just the CRM Users

I'm with Anne--I prefer a custom entity as well for employees, but since you are on 4.0, you cannot send Email to a custom entity. When you get to 2011, this might be an option.

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Community Member on at

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RE: Adding all Staff to the CRM and not just the CRM Users

I like the custom entity of all employees, but you do want to watch duplicate e-mail addresses across users, contacts and this new custom entity as CRM uses e-mail addresses for a variety of functions within the system.

Items like tracking and associating e-mails.

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Muhammad Adeel Javaid 5,580 on at

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RE: Adding all Staff to the CRM and not just the CRM Users

I am copying a link for you and hope it will be of use for you.

www.powerobjects.com/.../sending-meeting-requests-with-microsoft-dynamics-crm

Regards

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PS 23,577 on at

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RE: Adding all Staff to the CRM and not just the CRM Users

Hi Michael.

Although Neil is right but if that's not working for you; you can try the following process:

Create a custom entity by the name ''Employees' while creation keep in mind to check mark "Sending Email" field under communication and collaboration section of options for entity; this in turn will create email field automatically there in the new Employees form along with name. You can also create fields like Department, Designation, territory etc later as per your need. This will definitely solve your problem. This way you will not mix up your contacts and employees; you also don't need to create and disable users.

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Community Member on at

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RE: Adding all Staff to the CRM and not just the CRM Users

I have tried setting up CRM User accounts for staff who are not license holders and disabling them but the CRM always stops me from doing so.

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Community Member on at

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RE: Adding all Staff to the CRM and not just the CRM Users

Many thanks. I am sort of doing this at the moment but as you say it causes problems with tracking emails.

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Neil Benson 7,369 User Group Leader on at

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RE: Adding all Staff to the CRM and not just the CRM Users

Jerry's option is the usual option that most customers choose. One other option is to create a CRM user account for all your users, but disable the user record for those users that you don't want to purchase a license for. Also create a field on the user entity called Former Employee, then change the Quick Find All Users view so that users can find enabled or disabled users but former employees are filtered out.

The benefit of this approach is that all your employees are stored as users.

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CRMInnovation.com on at

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RE: Adding all Staff to the CRM and not just the CRM Users

You are on the right track. I would add a field to the Contact form that allows you to identify the employee contact records so they can be filtered separately. You might also do this for the employees that are CRM Users - make their contact record email address different (alias) from the email address in their User record. That way CRM emails they send out are tracked against their User address and not also tracked against their contact record.

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