A little bit of Irony

I must say that I find it quite ironic that for an application that was

built from the ground up to integrate, there really is no way to
integrate pick list data in CRM from other systems (supported or
unsupported).

The way in which pick lists are maintained in CRM is so advanced that
it makes it difficult (impossible?) to automate the maintenance of pick

lists. Something that is fairly simple to do in legacy applications.

I have a customer who is quite adamant that they do not want to have to

double enter pick lists in 2 separate applications (there pick lists
can be quite large) and is pretty upset that it cannot be done.

I think this is something that should be addressed in a patch (don't
want to wait for the next version) e.g. something like a web service or

perhaps even allow the pick list to be based off an external table
(provided that the column types match). Has anyone else run into this
requirement? Perhaps you've thought of a creative way of dealing with
the situation? Thoughts? Comments?

AndrewN23
Thu Mar 16 18:29:27 CST 2006

" built from the ground up to integrate" is just marketing drivel. There is a
measure of integration with a few other Microsoft products, but other than
that, the statement is incorrect IMO. "Integration" here means "works
passably with at least one other Microsoft product".

You could write code using the CRM Web services or direct from the
underlying SQL server tables to extract info from the CRM picklists and
migrate it to your other acpplication. You MIGHT be able to do it the other
way, but that would be a bit more problematic.

"Nahi" wrote:

> I must say that I find it quite ironic that for an application that was
>
> built from the ground up to integrate, there really is no way to
> integrate pick list data in CRM from other systems (supported or
> unsupported).
>
> The way in which pick lists are maintained in CRM is so advanced that
> it makes it difficult (impossible?) to automate the maintenance of pick
>
> lists. Something that is fairly simple to do in legacy applications.
>
> I have a customer who is quite adamant that they do not want to have to
>
> double enter pick lists in 2 separate applications (there pick lists
> can be quite large) and is pretty upset that it cannot be done.
>
> I think this is something that should be addressed in a patch (don't
> want to wait for the next version) e.g. something like a web service or
>
> perhaps even allow the pick list to be based off an external table
> (provided that the column types match). Has anyone else run into this
> requirement? Perhaps you've thought of a creative way of dealing with
> the situation? Thoughts? Comments?
>
>

Nahi
Fri Mar 17 08:39:46 CST 2006

Thanks for your response. Although I'm not sure I agree with your
assessment. At every other level it is fairly easy to integrate the
entities with other applications whether they be Microsoft or not. I
have quite a bit of experience here so I feel I can state this
confidently. However, the one area where integration has been
completely shut out in terms of integration is the pick list
management. It looks like a case of over-engineering to me. There were
simpler ways of going about the publishing of changes that would not
have introduced this problem, but instead Microsoft chose an incredibly
sophisticated way of doing it which resulted in the situation we have
today. I just don't think it was properly thought through in terms of
what the implications would be for this design (or perhaps it was done
intentionally to prevent support issues e.g. like the design of the
database - but I can't see why this would be the case).

Your suggestion for integration going the other way (from CRM to an
external application) is a good one. However, in some cases it's not
practical to have CRM serve as the master for this data. This is the
case that I'm dealing with right now.