Syncronising address changes in Dynamics CRM 4.0

Question

Hi

I'm having a problem with account addresses that seems to to me to be so obvious but I'm missing something.

In CRM there is an Account with a main address. It also has a list of "other" addresses. It also can have one or more Contacts associated which each also have a main address and a list of "other" addresses.

The problem is that often the same address is in more than one of these places and keeping all the addresses in sync when an account changes address is a real issue. For us it is a real time consuming, manual process finding and updating all occurrences of the address when an account moves.

My question is how is everyone else dealing with the problem of address changes? I thought of writing a plug in that could go through and find instances of an address and update them, but is this really the only way to solve the problem? It seems odd that managing many addresses like this in a CRM system would be so hard, but like a say perhaps i've missed something.

Kaneda

Answer 1

Hi, Kaneda

Unfortunately, I don't think you are missing anything: this is just the way it goes in Dynamics CRM. There are only two workarounds I can think of: - The first one is not storing company-based addresses at the Contact level at all. This approach may not be appropiate for your scenario, of course. - The second one is to use some kind of convention: addresses with an address_name beginning with "account_" are supposed to be "inherited" from the Account record. Then, adding a "Cascade addresses" button on the Account form that launches the update on the account_xxx addresses on the Contact records.

Hope it helps

Daniel

Answer 2

The easies option would be to create an on demand workflow on the contact entity (organization scope). The workflow simply updates the contact main address fields with the primary customer (account) address fields. The users can then navigate to the contacts associated views from within the account entity, click on the workflow toolbar button and select the cascading address workflow for all existing contacts. The disadvantage of using this approach is that you rely on user interaction.

Deciding on a convention as Daniel suggested is the right way to go. I would simply disable the contact main address fields so they can only be changed via your plug-in and teach the users to use the more addresses feature when they need to enter individual contact addresses.