Contact Management
The Contact object is one of the core objects in Microsoft CRM to which most other objects are attached or parented. It represents a person with whom a business unit has a relationship, such as a customer, a supplier, or a colleague. Included in this object is contact, professional, personal, and family information, as well as multiple addresses.
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Definition of Terms
Contact: A person with whom a business unit has a relationship.
Classes
The following table describes the classes of the contact management objects.
| Class | Description |
| CRMContact | Methods to manage contacts |
| CRMCustomerAddress | Methods to manage additional addresses
(This class is needed if you want to store more than two addresses for a contact.) |
Details
Both accounts and contacts are part of managing customers and are related to each other in the following ways:
- A contact can be a stand-alone object.
- A contact can be a parent to almost every other object. A contact can be a parent to every object type except accounts and contacts.
- A contact can have only one account as its parent.
- A contact can be marked as the “primary contact person” for an account using the CrmAccount.SetPrimaryContact method.
A contact is usually an individual person. The Contact object stores all information about a person such as an e-mail address, street address, multiple phone numbers, and any other information that relates to the contact, such as birthday or anniversary date. Depending on the type of customers a business unit has, it needs either only contacts or contacts and accounts to give a full view of its customers.
The basic operations that you can perform on a contact include Create, Read, Update, and Delete.
Linking objects such as Activities and Notes to the Contact object enables the user to see all the communication the user has had with a customer, any actions the user has taken on behalf of the customer, and all information the user needs about the customer.
Actions that can be performed on contacts include: Activate, Assign, Share, Create, Delete, Retrieve, and Update. For more general information, see Actions on Objects.
Tips
How To Create, Update, and Retrieve Address Information for Accounts and Contacts
During the initial creation of an Account or Contact, address1 and address2 information is added using the CRMAccount.Create or CRMContact.Create. These create methods automatically populate the CustomerAddressBase table and assigns the appropriate AddressNumber to each address. To add additional addresses, use the method CRMCustomerAddress.Create.
By default, Address2 information is not on the Account or Contact form. This can be added to the form through the System Customization page.
To update address1 or address2, use CRMAccount.Update or CRMContact.Update. For these methods, the accountid or contactid passes through the XML string containing the new address information.
To update additional addresses, use the method CRMCustomerAddress.Update. For this method, the CustomerAddressID is passed with the xml containing the new address information.
To retrieve all addresses associated with an Account or Contact, use the method CRMCustomerAddress.RetrieveByObject.