MS Dynamics CRM v4: Many to Many Relationships Limitations

Even though Microsoft added M:N (Many to Many) relationship support to their CRM product, there are still a lot of issues with it. Some of the things that you need to keep in mind:

1) If you let MS Dynamics create the intersection table between the two custom entities which are in an M:N relationship, then there is no way for you to add any other attributes to that intersection table. This intersection table will have the GUID columns from the two parent tables and an additional GUID column for the intersection table itself.

2) The intersection table created by MS Dynamics does not support workflow. What this means is that one cannot fire off workflows when a record gets created that ties up those entities.

So, how can you get around those limitations? Well, a M:N relationship between two entities gets resolved by creating an intersection table. Rather than letting MS Dynamics create it for, you should create a table yourself and then define two N:1 relationships with the parent tables. That way, you can by pass both the issues that are mentioned above.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM links

As you dig more into MS Dynamics CRM, here are a list of some useful sites and blogs which you might find useful for your work:

http://www.decipherinfosys.com/MS_Dynamics_CRM.opml

More CRM Wars

Salesforce.com and Google partnered recently to allow the former to bundle google apps along with their CRM applications. The new combined package is called Salesforce.com for GoogleApps and it is available for free to their customers. Their CRM applications integrate with Google App’s e-mail, documents, calender as well as IMs.

So, what does this mean for MS Dynamics? It means more competition to the MS Dynamics CRM Online version. This could also mean a potential buyout of Salesforce.com by Google…only time will tell.

Online version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Microsoft has provided an alternative to Salesforce.com with their latest offering of Dynamics CRM’s online version. You can read up more over here: Intelligent Enterprise Dynamics CRM and the Microsoft’s press release.

A new category – CRM

We are introducing a new category today on our blog – CRM. Our consulting team is also doing CRM related projects with SalesLogix, MS Dynamics, Salesforce.com and open source CRMs like vtiger and SugarCRM. Watch this space as we start posting our experiences as well as tips and tricks for making the most of your CRM solutions.