Building Appropriate Relationships

Posted by Kristie Reid on December 2, 2009  |  Comments (2)

When CRM 4.0 came out, one of the announcements that had me very excited was the introduction of Many:Many relationships. At the time, it sounded like such a useful feature! I couldn’t begin to count how many times in the past did I need to relate many of one entity to several of another. However, the first time that I went to use this new feature, I found myself stuck. The main dilemma is that you are unable to capture any details about that relationship. Let’s look at an example of different relationships that may need to exist between Contacts and Accounts.

Using the out of the box relationship between Accounts and Contacts limits you in that each Contact must have the Account listed as the Parent Account.

However, if you wanted to track that Jim is the Principal at Sonoma Partners and a Microsoft MVP, you could not relate that Contact record to both Accounts. This appears to be a very appropriate use of N:N relationships.

 
One advantage to this approach is that the user interface is very simple to use. Simply click Add Existing Account from a Contact record and select the Account to create the relationship for. However, no additional information about the relationship between the Contact and Account can be stored, for example, the role of the Contact within that Account. For Accounts, Contacts, and Opportunities, you could also use the Relationships feature but this would not allow you to track information above and beyond the role, such as when Jim became an MVP at Microsoft.

To handle the tracking of this additional information, the best approach remains an additional entity to serve as a cross reference between Accounts and Contacts. This entity would store lookups to the Account and Contact along with any additional information about the relationship that needs to be tracked.