Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online is a customization-friendly Customer Relationship and marketing automation platform that allows for increased productivity and efficiency when dealing with prospects and existing clients. Above all, the main advantage of Microsoft Dynamics CRM is its extensive level of customization. It varies from simply changing the label of a single field, to completely custom-developed add-ons. In short, this enhances and extends the functionality of the system.
It is important to know what level of customization is required to achieve the required task. It is not feasible to heavily invest in a Custom-developed, fully-integrated add-on. As only a few customized fields and workflows from within CRM can do the job just as well.
In this example that I’m about to show you will demonstrate how to add a simple custom field to your Microsoft Dynamics CRM online environment. I will be adding a “Follow-up date” field to the Lead entity and will change the view to sort by the newly created field.
As we are making irreversible changes to the CRM system, we would need to create a backup of the system as it is now. Customizing the system will not compromise the data itself, however, modifications and changes to the forms and fields will be affected. Therefore, it is prudent to export the solution.
Please refer to our earlier blog post about exporting customizations in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. You can find it here.
Customization of fields
The following steps describe the process for creating a custom field and placing that field on a form.
- Open the personalization toolbar by selecting Options, and then Personalize this form.
- Click Insert and then Field.
- Select the region of the form where you want to expose the new field. As a result, the Insert fields dialog box will display a list of existing fields that can be inserted into the selected region of the form.
- Ensure that the field you are interested in does not already exist in the list. If it does, you can simply select that field in the list and click Insert.
- Click the Create new field button above the list to initiate the process of creating a custom field. Consequently, this will open the Create new field dialog box. If you do not see the Create new field button, you do not have the necessary permissions to use this feature.
- In the Create new field dialog box, enter the required information.
- If this is the only field that you need to create for this form, click Save. If you need to create additional fields, click Save and new and go back to step 7. Note that there is currently a limit of 20 custom fields per table.
- Leaving the Create new field dialog box will return you to the Insert fields dialog box. Any custom fields that were just added will be automatically marked in the field list to be inserted into the form.
- Click Insert to insert the marked fields into the selected region of the form.
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