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Establish Link Between Competitor and Email (or other Activity) Entities RRS feed

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    CRM 2011 UR13

    I have received a request from our users to be able to track Activities, primarily Emails and Phone messages, against records in the Competitor entity (similar in the way they track emails against Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, etc.).

    I can see that there is no relationship between these two entities.  Is there some way to establish this relationship?

    The alternative is that the business users will want to set up Competitors as accounts, which will then create issue with other entity linkages, eg Opportunities.

    Thanks.

    Michael Thorne Team Leader, Corporate Applications Queensland Investment Corporation

    Wednesday, January 22, 2014 6:09 AM

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    Hi Michael,

    As far as I am aware, the competitor entity can not be enabled for activities, which means that you will not be able to select a competitor record in the regarding field for the activity. You could create a custom relationship between each activity type and the competitor entity. But this would mean having to manually set the competitor lookup on the form of any activity and of course this wouldn't help you to track activities from within Outlook (assuming you use the outlook client).

    Personally, I would re-consider your alternative approach to capture Competitors as accounts. You could add an account type picklist to the entity with values such as; Customer, Supplier, Competitor etc etc so that you can leverage this field for system views e.g. having a system view just to show competitors.

    If you wanted to continue to use the competitor entity (for opportunity purposes etc) you could always have a workflow that when a competitor record is created it also creates a corresponding account record so that activities can be tracked against it. This isn't ideal from a data point of view, essentially you have 2 records to represent a single competitor, but it could help you meet your requirement.

    Regards

    Carl

    Wednesday, January 22, 2014 8:21 AM
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    Hi Michael,

        The best way for this would be to mark competitors as account in this case. Even if the relationship is added, tracking from outlook is not going to be possible. So the simplest solution is to create competitors as account and create custom lookup to filter out competitors.


    Hope this helps.
     
    -----------------------------------------------------------------------
     Minal Dahiya
    blog : http://minaldahiya.blogspot.com.au/

     
    If this post answers your question, please click "Mark As Answer" on the post and "Vote as Helpful"

    Wednesday, January 22, 2014 8:22 AM

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    Hi Michael,

    As far as I am aware, the competitor entity can not be enabled for activities, which means that you will not be able to select a competitor record in the regarding field for the activity. You could create a custom relationship between each activity type and the competitor entity. But this would mean having to manually set the competitor lookup on the form of any activity and of course this wouldn't help you to track activities from within Outlook (assuming you use the outlook client).

    Personally, I would re-consider your alternative approach to capture Competitors as accounts. You could add an account type picklist to the entity with values such as; Customer, Supplier, Competitor etc etc so that you can leverage this field for system views e.g. having a system view just to show competitors.

    If you wanted to continue to use the competitor entity (for opportunity purposes etc) you could always have a workflow that when a competitor record is created it also creates a corresponding account record so that activities can be tracked against it. This isn't ideal from a data point of view, essentially you have 2 records to represent a single competitor, but it could help you meet your requirement.

    Regards

    Carl

    Wednesday, January 22, 2014 8:21 AM
  • Question
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    0
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    Hi Michael,

        The best way for this would be to mark competitors as account in this case. Even if the relationship is added, tracking from outlook is not going to be possible. So the simplest solution is to create competitors as account and create custom lookup to filter out competitors.


    Hope this helps.
     
    -----------------------------------------------------------------------
     Minal Dahiya
    blog : http://minaldahiya.blogspot.com.au/

     
    If this post answers your question, please click "Mark As Answer" on the post and "Vote as Helpful"

    Wednesday, January 22, 2014 8:22 AM