Mitch Milam's Dynamics CRM and xRM Discussions

Occasionally, I encounter a customer who has absolutely no need to track Leads. They start the relationship using Accounts and Contacts.  In order to maintain a clean user experience, we usually just remove all rights to the Lead Entity so that it will be removed from the CRM user interface.

In CRM 3.0, this practice works as expected and produces few, if any, side-effects.  However, with CRM 4.0, we have run across an interesting issue associated with email tracking.  Depending on how you configure email tracking, CRM can automatically track an email without using the CRM tracking token by locating the email address within CRM.  It does this by performing a search within Leads, Accounts, and Contacts.

The Problem

The problem arises when you have access to Leads disabled.  Outlook ( or more correctly, the CRM Add-in ) will start generating errors related to security, permissions, etc. because if you don't have at least read access to an Entity, you can not  query against it.

The Solution

1) Modify the various Security Roles and remove all access from Lead with the exception of Read.

2) Export the SiteMap.

3) Modify the SiteMap using WordPad or Visual Studio. For each location where you find Lead, you will need to add a Privilege Node, as shown below:

            <SubArea Id="nav_leads10" Entity="lead" DescriptionResourceId="Lead_SubArea_Description">

                <Privilege Entity="lead" Privilege="Write" />

            </SubArea>

4) Import the modified site map.

How the Solution Works

By removing all privileges from the Lead Entity ( with the exception of Read ) you effectively remove from the users, the ability to create new Leads.  Leaving Read access enabled allows the CRM Client to properly query Lead for emails.  None will be found, of course, since there is no data, but it will not generate an error.

Modifying the CRM SiteMap allows us to remove the Leads Entity from the CRM user interface.  The Privilege node we add to each instance of Lead instructs CRM to only display the Lead Entity if the user has the Write Privilege.  Since users only have the Read Privilege, this effectively removes Leads from the UI.

Additional Actions

If you would like to carry this further, you may also wish to modify the Account and Contact forms to remove the references to Originating Lead.

If so, let's meet up.  Drop me an email.

mitch at crmaccelerators dot net