I already received tons of emails on my new blog and one of them was from Joshua. Joshua asked if I knew a tool that could help him and his colleagues link all of their contacts to their corresponding accounts in a drag and drop kind of fashion. Phew that was a long sentence, let me get my breath there for a second!
I actually don’t know of a tool that does this in a drag and drop kind of way, but what I do know is that it is fairly easy to do with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. With v4.0 we introduced a way to “bulk” track, set regarding or set parent on records in Outlook. So how would I solve this for my existing contacts in Outlook? I am making one assumption, and that is that my CRM database has been populated with accounts.
1. Open your Microsoft Office Outlook.
2. Click Contacts in your Ribbon.
3. Select Phone List as Current View, this will give you the option to sort on Company on your right side.
4. Once you’ve sorted your contacts by Company name you can then multi-select them by clicking the first contact on company X and hold the SHIFT key while you select the last contact for Company X.
5. Now Click “Set Parent” and specify the parent account inside Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
6. Voila, now you can quickly link your existing contacts to your accounts inside Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
7. (If you don’t have the accounts in CRM, you can can use the NEW button at the bottom left to “quick create” a new account record.)
Hope this helps everybody with a similar challenge as Joshua had. Please leave a comment if you know a quicker or better way to do this, as I am always open to learn!
With kind regards,
And visit my blog at http://www.tekoppele.com/blog