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On the Account form, there is a pulldown for Relationship Type. What is the purpose of this? Is it meant to serve a different purpose from Connections, or Relationships?
Thanks.
Danny
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Relationship Type typically indicates how the account in question is related to the organization using CRM (your company). Connections can be used for relating accounts to other accounts, contacts or basically any other record. As an example, an account that is categorized as your Reseller by the Relationship Type attribute might be related to other accounts in your CRM that are customers of that reseller. When utilizing the Relationship Type option set field there is no need to specify the other party, as that is always your company, whereas with Connections the relationship can be examined from two directions and both parties of the relationship can have a role value assigned.
Regarding the Relationships feature (Customer Relationships entity), this is a legacy feature that exists in CRM 2011 only for backward compatibility purposes. It's a more limited version of the Connections feature, used in CRM 3.0 and 4.0. By default in a new CRM 2011 / CRM Online organization it is only visible to the system administrator. Unless you have some legacy data in the Customer Relationship entities, I strongly recommend you to not enter any data here as the feature may not be available in future versions of Dynamics CRM anymore.
Ah - ok - I was confused particularly about the Relationship Type. I understand what you've written, but now have a new question: If Relationship Type categorizes the relationship between the host Company (my Company) and the Accounts in the CRM, then isn't this just a particular case of a connection? And in that case, wouldn't the list of Connection Roles be the same as the list of Relationship Types?
You're correct in your assumption that the Relationship Type is really just one type of a Connection Role. However, there are often benefits in determining the relationship between the host company and the account through a form field rather than a related entity (connection). For example, it is possible to force the user to always fill a value for the Relationship Type, whereas Connections are always optional. Also, you can easily add the Relationship Type as an account view column and help the users identify the types of accounts from a list, whereas with Connections you can't do this, due to their 1-to-many nature.
This actually leads us to one potential scenario where the Relationship Type may be insufficient for recording information about an account. What if the account acts in more than one role towards your company? Let's say they are both a customer and a partner. The single account form field won't allow you to store more than one value, which is where either a Connection or a custom entity is needed for mapping the relationships. While Connections could theoretically meet the requirements for this use case, the fact that you'd always need to specify the other side of the party (your company) when entering a new value may mean it's easier to create a custom entity for this purpose instead. Anyway, this is only valid for a scenario where there is a need to manage multiple concurrent relationships towards the same account.
Thanks for unpacking this in detail. A further question: Let's say my company does have relationships of multiple types with some of our customers. Could I add my own company as an Account, and THEN specify multiple connections between my company's account and any other entity in the CRM?
It is perfectly possible to create an account in the system that represents the organization who's using CRM. However, since this account will most likely be a party in a huge number of connection records if you decide to map all the business relationships through this way, you'll need to consider what is the optimal way to present this information to the user. Although you can create view filters that present only records having a particular connection, the data model in this is somewhat more complex than in the Relationship Type or custom entity approach.
My personal opinion is that Connections are great for recording ad-hoc relationships between records. You know, for the kind of information that doesn't have a specific place in your CRM data model since it may not apply to most customers/records. I'd call it semi-structured data compared to the structured data managed through fixed relationships between entities or specific parameters on an entity form. They could also be considered a way of tagging information in CRM based on the needs of individual users. There's nothing stopping you from using them to map all the customer relationships in your CRM, but as the amount of data increases it may become difficult to manage it through Connections alone.
Please take a look at this article. It is possible since with Dynamics 365 9.0 version. Create a custom field that allows multiple values for relationship types. community.dynamics.com/.../dynamics-365-multi-select-fields
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