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Nobody Parties like Microsoft Dynamics CRM Activity Parties
Microsoft Dynamics CRM allows users to capture their daily activities in an number of different ways. The product natively offers a handful of activities like emails, phone calls, appointments and tasks, but it also allows you to define and create your own custom activities. Working with these activities in the CRM user interface is very intuitive, but importing the data through the API comes with some challenges, especially when creating the CRM activity parties.
Activity parties are the fields in CRM that hold multiple values, just like you can have many recipients in the To field on an email. If you’ve ever had to import activities into Microsoft Dynamics CRM, then you’ve run into some challenges when properly formatting your data and storing it in the correct locations. This process is pretty straight forward for most of the fields like the subject, detail and owner fields. But how do you handle the challenge of populating the activity party fields like To, CC & Bcc fields?
There are a few different tools available to accomplish this, including writing your own custom code to import data against the API. In this example, I’ll walk you through the process of creating them with a tool called Scribe Online, which is a cloud based platform that is used to migrate data between your applications.
Here’s a portion of my Scribe map that creates an activity called a Phone Call. I’m making some assumptions here that you know how to build the appropriate map, as well as query the GUID’s needed for the From and To activity parties.
We can create the FROM activity party by mapping the following four fields. Don’t forget to include an IF step to ensure this system user exists.
Here’s the TO activity party, which is very similar to the FROM party. The participationtypemask values are very specific to Microsoft, and determine how this activity party attaches to the activity. Check out this article from Microsoft that helps identify the proper codes: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg328549.aspx
Can we help you with your data migration or integration? Please feel free to contact us.
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