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Custom Entity or not

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Posted on by MikeRoberts

I have a scenario where we will have an organization with many volunteers. We have considered creating a custom entity, but want to understand the best practices. It seems like we have many choices including creating a solution and modifying the contact entity.

Instead, I was thinking of creating a "volunteer" entity and then making a relationship with a contact, but I thought 1:1 relationships were bad. I assumed by having a contact relationship I could create segments and do all the typical actions with the volunteer

This begs the question, why not set a few fields on the contact itself for volunteer-specific attributes.

We want to be able to do things like send marketing emails, journeys, etc. so I want to ensure that the entity we create will allow us to do most of the things we can do with a contact.

How should we think about this, all the information I read shows very simple examples of coffee shops and other types of businesses but doesn't explain the pros and cons of custom entities and how they relate to the main entity types of leads and contacts.

Any guidance would be appreciated.

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RE: Custom Entity or not

Hi MikeRoberts,

If you want to make the volunteers do the same things like contacts, add some custom fields on the Contact entity to distinguish would be better. Because the Contact entity is a special entity that has some OOB feature with it. For example, if you want to create segments and send the marketing email to them, you can only filter the Contact records.

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Thomas Lee 38 on at

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RE: Custom Entity or not

Hi..!!

When you are managing the CRM users (teams) and the CRM activities from the MS Dynamics 365 CRM, you need to track the CRM activities and entity records as per scheduling dates. If you have Dynamics 365 administrator rights, you can check the activities from the default Dynamics calendar and manage accordingly. There are some limitations to check and manage all the activities and especially entity records from the default dynamics calendar.

To know more: https://www.appjetty.com/blog/how-to-configure-the-entity-calendar-in-dynamics-365-crm-custom-calendar-plugin/

Hope this helps!

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Jay Leffue 14 on at

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RE: Custom Entity or not

I would extend the contact table, not create a new table, especially with Marketing module in play. Contact is a person, and volunteers are persons. It's one of the core tables in D365 made for this purpose and is meant to be configured for your business use cases. I would add the volunteer attributes directly on contact.

Theres a lot of precedence for this as well. In Cloud for health Contact is Patient, Doctor, etc. In Field Service Contact is Technicians etc.

Now, if you want to link volunteers to the events or items they are volunteering for, yes, creating a custom entity between event and contact could make sense so you could track the data about that volunteering instance.

It is common for Contact to represent different types of contacts (Volunteers, Sales Contact, etc), and we differentiate between them with different forms for the business use cases.

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