It seems that if you deactivate a Contact, it disappears from the Account that it belonged to, and there is no view available within an Account that shows Contacts that have been deactivated.
I hope this is not in fact the case and that I have just failed to find the way to see these. What I need is to be able to know all the people who have been contacts at a particular account, even if they are no longer there or no longer relevant. Yet now there seems to be no way to distinguish, among all the people associated with an account, between those who are still there and active and those who are no longer there or no longer active.
Thanks in advance!
Edited byMichel EhrlichThursday, January 21, 2010 1:02 PM
If you open the Account record and select Contacts from the left navigation menu, you will see all Contacts Active and Inactive. Otherwise, as Andriy stated, you can change your view when you are looking directly at the list of Contacts for all Accounts or you can select Contacts from the Sales or Service module and change the view from My Active Contacts to Inactive Contacts to see a list of all inactive Contacts.
Best Regards, Donna
Proposed as answer byDonna EdwardsMVPThursday, January 14, 2010 1:59 PM
Marked as answer byJim Glass JrFriday, January 22, 2010 4:09 PM
Donna, I'm pretty sure that all the associated views only ever display active records. Otherwise the associated contacts grid on the Account form would be filled with inactive contacts caused through merging and so on. I've never seen inactive records displayed in any associated view grid in any Dynamics CRM implementation -- my experience matches SmallBusinessOwner's.
Marked as answer byJim Glass JrFriday, January 22, 2010 4:09 PM
If you open the Account record and select Contacts from the left navigation menu, you will see all Contacts Active and Inactive. Otherwise, as Andriy stated, you can change your view when you are looking directly at the list of Contacts for all Accounts or you can select Contacts from the Sales or Service module and change the view from My Active Contacts to Inactive Contacts to see a list of all inactive Contacts.
Best Regards, Donna
Proposed as answer byDonna EdwardsMVPThursday, January 14, 2010 1:59 PM
Marked as answer byJim Glass JrFriday, January 22, 2010 4:09 PM
Hello Donna and thanks for the reply. Just so I'm sure of what you're saying -- in an uncustomised envt, if i go into an account and click on Contacts on the left, i should see both active and de-activated contacts? That is indeed what I need, but that is not what's happening.
Andriy, thanks for your reply. I'm going to first see if I can do this through the gui
Yes, you should see both Active and Inactive Contact records when you open an Account record and from the Account record select Contacts. If the Account has any inactive Contacts, you will see them associated to the Account record. This is standard, default, out-of-the-box functionality. You will need to ensure that people are actually deactivating Contact records and not deleting them.
You can also go to the Contact grid view under Sales or Service and change the view to Inactive Contacts to see if you have any inactive Contacts in the system. If you have an inactive Contact, open it and from the Contact record, select the Account link (Parent Account), open the Account and select Contact from the left menu. You should see the inactive Contact record.
Is it possible that your inactive Contacts do not have a Parent Account association? If so, then you won't see the Contact record in the Account view.Best Regards,
Donna
Marked as answer byJim Glass JrThursday, January 14, 2010 3:41 PM
Unmarked as answer byMichel EhrlichThursday, January 21, 2010 12:54 PM
Marked as answer byJim Glass JrFriday, January 22, 2010 4:09 PM
Unmarked as answer byDonna EdwardsMVPMonday, January 25, 2010 7:17 PM
Perhaps an option would be to create a new Active Status Reason for Contacts called 'Mostly Inactive' (or something more meaningful) and then use this for deactivation instead.
Leon Tribe Want to hear me talk about all things CRM? Check out my blog http://leontribe.blogspot.com/ or hear me tweet @leontribe
Want to hear me talk about all things CRM? Check out my blog
http://leontribe.blogspot.com/ or hear me tweet @leontribe
Proposed as answer byLeon TribeMVPThursday, January 14, 2010 5:54 PM
Thanks again Donna. Not sure about the etiquette in this forum so if I'm doing this wrong please correct me, but I'm Unmarking your reply as Answer because it doesn't correspond to my experience and my problem is still there, and I'm hoping to get to the bottom of this.
You state very clearly that, out of the box, I should see both Active and Inactive Contacts when I open an Account record and then from the Account record select Contacts. This just ain't happening for me -- the Inactive ones are gone, and yes I can confirm that the people I should be seeing and am not seeing were Deactivated, not Deleted, and I can confirm that they do have a Parent Account association.. (I cross-checked this via the Contact grid view.)
My CRM is virgin out-of-the-box apart from some very minor GUI-level "customisations" that I've done myself -- in other words, I may have customised a view here and a form there, but absolutely no code (I don't know a single character of any non-human language) and I am quite sure I've not customised the Contact entity in any way. Might I have done something to the default Contacts view *within* the Account? I think I once looked for a way to customise these views that are within the Account, such as Orders as another example, but didn't find one.
Thanks again and best regards
UPDATE: Same problem for Canceled Orders. Have updated thread title accordingly.
There is either something wrong with your system or the terms we are using do not match.
Question: In your application, when you open an Account record and select Contacts from the left navigation, does the view of the Contact records (grid display) include a view of the Status and the Parent Account field? If not, please add those fields to the view under Customization and see if you have a mix of Active and Inactive records based on the status. Here are the steps to change that view:
Go to Settings, Customization, Customize Entity, and open the Contact entity Select Forms and Views from the left navigation Open the Contact Associated View Select Add Colums Add the Status and Parent Account columns if they are not already present Save the Form and Publish the changes
Now go back Accounts in CRM and open an Account where where you are sure you have 'Deactivated' related Contact, select Contacts from the left navigation window of the Account record and look at the status column you just added to the view.
If needed, add a 'test' Contact record to the account you are viewing and select Actions from the top menu of the Contact record and select 'Deactivate' just to ensure you have an Inactive Contact record for that Account.
Best Regards, Donna
Marked as answer byJim Glass JrFriday, January 22, 2010 4:09 PM
Unmarked as answer byDonna EdwardsMVPMonday, January 25, 2010 7:17 PM
Donna, I'm pretty sure that all the associated views only ever display active records. Otherwise the associated contacts grid on the Account form would be filled with inactive contacts caused through merging and so on. I've never seen inactive records displayed in any associated view grid in any Dynamics CRM implementation -- my experience matches SmallBusinessOwner's.
Marked as answer byJim Glass JrFriday, January 22, 2010 4:09 PM
Hi Donna, your screenshot shows that your system has been customised quite a bit, perhaps the standard behaviour has been changed? I tried it with a fresh, hosted instance of CRM, and when I deactivated a contact from the account associated contacts grid, the contact disappeared from the view. Have you tried this with the VPC?
It is not customized as much as it might appear. It is configured through standard methods. However, it is an upgraded system from 1.2 to 3 to 4 so maybe there is something in the upgrade that was carried through from a previous system. There is no customization in the view that would cause the behavior. This is a standard install / upgraded, fully suppported system with very little javascript running on the forms, no plug-ins, or other customization.
So I tested the behavior on another system and the Contact form behaved as Neil said. The inactive Contact was removed from that particular view. Having said that, since this particular system is displaying both active and inactive, my guess is that it could be related to some additional Contact relationships added as 1:N between the Contact and Account entities, or it is a carry over from an upgrade.
SmallBusinessUser can try adding a 1:N relationship between the Contact and Account as a test, publish the changes and see if the associated view from the Account form now shows both record types (active and inactive). I don't know why it would change as a result of that, but the only other reason must be related to upgrades, hot fixes, etc as there is no other customization on the application. This is a production system.
With regard to Orders, since Orders are not deactivated but rather closed, SMB should be able to see all Orders by opening an Account record and select Orders from the left navigation, the 'filter on' is set to Active by default but you can change that selection to All and see all the Orders. Since Orders are not deactived, changing the view to All should show all orders.
With regard to Contacts, there are many ways to see inactive Contacts in the system either through Advanced Find, creating views, using default views for Inactive records, etc. The inactive records don't disappear they may just not be available in a particular view so we may need to modify the view to make them available, change some setting, or simply be willing to look at them from a different view. The good news, they have not disappeared from the system.
Here is the need as initially stated by SMB: What I need is to be able to know all the people who have been contacts at a particular account, even if they are no longer there or no longer relevant.
This can easily be done, several ways, using out-of-the-box capability. One method is to go to Contacts, change the view to Inactive and the user will have a full list of Inactive Contacts. If the view does not have the Account name, the Account name can be added to the View.
I surely hope this provides the information and clarification needed so we can all move on.
Thanks again Donna. I do understand that there are other ways to find in active Contacts and see which Accounts they are associated with. The thing is -- and this is perhaps a particularity of my business -- what I really need is to basically be able to see, *whenever I am working within a particular Account*, who *all* the Contacts not onnly are but *were* at the same time, and as a matter of routine experience (i.e. just to *see* that automaticaly each time I'm in an Account). This is because the world I do business in is a pretty small "inbred" world, heavily inter-networked, people know each other, and it's important to know who has been where. People don't disappear from my market when they leave an organisation -- they usually just move to another organisation that either is already, or else should soon be, a client account as well. My impression from this experience with inactive Contacts is that CRM is more designed for selling to and servicing much larger numbers of people in much more dispersed markets, but I may of course be wrong about that. Anyway, enough editorializing -- thanks again!
Understood, you can look into the customization that Andriy recommended as it seems like your best option at this point. Another option, if you would like to use standard methods, is to create a SRSS report showing a list of all Contacts and embed that in an IFrame on the Account page. This is fairly easy to do if you have a resource that can create a custom report.
I am not quite sure why the production system I was looking at displays both, but obviously it is quite possible since that system displays all the Contacts. My best guess is that it is somehow associated with upgrading from 1.2 as I am positive there is no customization to the application since I have been and remain the only system admin since initial implementation.
Unfortunately, I am not receiving alerts for this particular post so I may not respond timely to any additional replies. I just happened to check back today. Have a good week.
Best Regards, Donna
Andriy, thanks again for your post, too, and I have tried what you suggest. It went fine for entities Contact and Account, but I was not able to find the string "Quick Find Active" in the xml export from Order. Any ideas?
Deactivated Contacts & Canceled Orders Disappear Completely from Account?
