The Dangers of Repurposing Existing CRM Entities

Posted on June 11th, 2009 mitch  Print 2 comments

Since Dynamics CRM can be so easily customized, one of the traps that CRM developers and architects occasionally find themselves in is using an existing CRM entity for a different purpose.

An example would be using the Case Entity (incident) to track product fulfillment requests.

Usually, when such a decision is made, the entity being repurposed is not being used and as far as the designers can see, it will never be used.  So, they customize it to fit their needs and, in some cases, completely altering the visual and structural layout of the entity to where you can’t actually determine how it looked and worked before.

Then, as is more the case than not, 6 to 12 months into the future, when Dynamics CRM is running your business, you find yet another need that can be filled by using parts of the system that were previously unused.

The only problem is, you’ve repurposed that part ( the Case Entity, for example ) and it is so customized and heavily used that it would be almost impossible to move the customizations and data to a new entity and revert the original Entity back to it’s original design and purpose.

Repurpose or Create

If you are starting down the repurposing path, you need to ask yourself why you are doing so.  What is is about the Entity that makes you think:

1. You will never use it
2. It has some design feature that can’t be duplicated in a custom entity

There are indeed occasions where a standard CRM Entity has a feature that you can’t duplicate on a custom Entity – like the Customer data type ( can be Account OR contact ).  But most of the time, you’ll spend as much time removing or hiding the existing functionality as you would have in creating a new Entity from scratch. 

Sometimes even more time is spent customizing the standard Entity and it would be to just create the whole thing from scratch.

Conclusion

When your requirements call for a new custom Entity, start from scratch, don’t automatically look for an existing Entity that is not used and change it.  Microsoft spent a lot of time and effort into the design of Dynamics CRM and the relationships between the Entities is pretty well defined and understood.

Have your design add value to CRM, not change CRM in ways that will cause issues later.

Customization, Dynamics CRM

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

 Loading ...

520 views