Jeremy Hofmann
Crowe Chizek and Company LLC
October 10th, 2007
http://www.crowecrm.com
Summary: Jeremy gives us a look at the various relationships that can be defined within CRM 4.0 through an example of adding multiple users lookups to an opportunity form.
Several key enhancements will be released with CRM 4.0 “Titan”. One area that Microsoft has blown the lid off and has opened up a whole new realm of possibility for configuration is in the area of system to system relationship definition. No longer are you restricted to creating one-to-many or many-to-one relationships between system entities and your custom entities only. Now you can create full blown one-to-many, many-to-one, and even many-to-many relationships between system entities, custom entities, or any combination thereof.
Wow. What this basically means is that you can enable several key scenarios that (before Titan) required writing some pretty tricky JavaScript code to get working. One such scenario is trying to associate multiple internal users to an opportunity, for example. Let’s say you have several key people working internally to win an opportunity, and that you wish to associate each of these internal users to the opportunity. Prior to Titan, you would have had to “create” your own multiple-user lookup buttons on the opportunity form, and inject a bit of JavaScript magic to get the lookup dialogs to work properly for each user that you want to track. Not exactly supported, not exactly pretty.
With Titan, you can now define a one-to-many relationship between the Opportunity entity and the System User entity, and then add as many users to the opportunity as you wish. Or, if you wanted to track more specifically which roles those users play on the opportunity, then you could add multiple Opportunity to System User relationships and give each one a different name. What ends up showing up in the form is the following:
Pretty nifty! And no JavaScript developers were harmed in the making of this customization – great!
You can do the same with the other entities as well. For example, you may want to track who the Finance person, main Sales person, and main Customer Service person is at each Account. Or, you may want to track the main Product that a Lead is interested in.
Now you can do these and other scenarios with pure configuration, saving you time, dollars, ensuring you system data integrity stays intact, and making your end users happy (which, let’s face it, means just about EVERYTHING when it comes to CRM bliss).
Jeremy Hofmann is a Manager and CRM specialist at Crowe Chizek in the Chicago (Oakbrook) office.
