Inactive Contacts on Marketing Lists

I learned something new today about inactive contacts and marketing lists.

When implementing CRM, I generally setup security such that most general users cannot fully delete records but rather deactivate them. This protects from the accidental deletion, not that any of us have ever done that before... :)

Anyways, A client called up and said that they sent out their annual report, and used CRM marketing lists to generate the mailing labels. They sent out the Annual Report and got a few bounce backs from contacts who were retired or had moved on to other organizations. When they went to CRM to de-activate these contacts, they noticed that they had already been deactived some time ago!

Upon further investigation, these inactive contacts were still members of the various lists, including this particular customer's Annual Report marketing list.

I suppose this is by design in case you want to market to lost customers, or lost leads, etc. However maybe their should be an option in the system settings to set whether a marketing list can have inactive members.

Anyways, after going through the process of "managing marketing list" members we were able to clean up the list. However, after years of working with CRM, there are still things that you discover every day!

Changing the CRM Organization Name

A customer pointed out today that I made a slight error when entering thier company name while setting up Dynamics CRM 4.0 and asked if it could be changed. I thought that this would be a situation where I would have to go in and make changes to the database directly (which falls under "unsupported" territory).

However, after some investigation, I found that actually was an easy process.

These steps are handy for situations where you may have misspelled the organization name or if a company name changes.

1) Ask users to be out of CRM or do this during a maintenance window
2) Make a SQL backup (always good advice)
3) On the CRM server, launch deployment manager
4) Navigate to Deployment Manager -> Organizations
5) Highlight the organization, right click and choose disable (if you are using enterprise version there may be more than one organization)
6) Once disabled, you will be able to edit the friendly name, you cannot change the database name.
7) Save and apply changes, after a few minutes the name will be changed
8) Enable the organization!

That is all there is to it. Shouldn't take more than 10 minutes.

And again, my apologies to the good folks using CRM at Mother Tuckers Kitchen. I promise to fix the issue on the my keyboard with "T"'s mixing up with the "F"'s