There are a lot of weird ways to pre-populate new CRM entities and none of them seemed to work for what I was doing. We manage our leads in a contact list in SharePoint. When we want to upgrade that lead into our CRM system for tracking there ended up being a lot of duplicate data entry. I’m sure there are a lot of programmatic ways to move a SharePoint Contact into CRM, but I couldn’t find out how to do it myself, or afford to pay a programmer to do it for me. I ended up using the Calculated Column to write an HTML link that would open up the new contact in CRM pre-populated with the info from the List item. This turned out to be a really nice way to do it.
Here’s how I did it:
I used the calculated column from Path to SharePoint to make a link to the new entity page on the development server.
My calculated column code looked like this:
=CONCATENATE("<div><p><a href='http://crm/org/sfa/conts/edit.aspx?firstname=",[First Name],"&lastname=",[Last Name],"&middlename=",[Middle Name],"&emailaddress1=",[E-mail Address],"&address1_line1=",Address,"&address1_city=",City,"&address1_stateorprovince=",[State/Province],"&address1_postalcode=",[ZIP/Postal Code],"&address1_country=",[Country/Region],"&telephone1=",[Business Phone],"&fax=",[Fax Number],"&jobtitle=",[Job Title],"&telephone2=",[Home Phone],"&mobilephone=",[Mobile Phone],"'target='_blank'>Promote Lead to CRM Contact</a><p/></div> ")
So as you can see there is a new calculated link up at the top of the item. When you click it will open our CRM Contact with the appropriate info pre-populated:
This ended up saving a lot of time on data entry. Of course we could use the lead entity in CRM to begin with but that wouldn’t work in our business model.
Thanks