Topic: ‘Forms and Views’

A colleague in our Administration department recently approached me with a dilemma.  Companies in the database were getting bought by other companies; however they were remaining clients of ours (from the start, it doesn’t sound like too much of a dilemma to me…).  However, if a sales representative were to search in the CRM database for an Account with which they were familiar (and that particular Account had recently been renamed), no results would surface.  To help “relabel” the changing companies, our Administration department has cleverly labeled the old name as an “Alias.”  So the original name will remain on the record, but as an “Alias” field.  The field was placed on the record in order to display the original title of the company (the new title of the company was populated into the “Account Name” field of the record).

Why were no results returned in the search?  The company had been renamed, and the sales representative had not become akin to the new name – so they technically were searching the database for an Account name that didn’t exist.  We needed to find a way for our employees to search the company by the old name, now the “Alias,” but still find the company under the new name, the “Account Name.”  I thought of a few ideas – Advanced Find views, new columns, email notifications through workflows, etc. – but none of them were ingenious enough.

I finally came up with the idea to utilize the Quick Find View functionality inside of CRM. Some people just glance at this section inside of CRM and move past it – at least I know I did.  When you add a Quick Find column to the View, a column doesn’t even show up.  Upon first glance, it doesn’t even really seem like it does anything.  Until you do some research, fully test out the functionality, and utilize the Quick Find View from every angle, it will seem like a mystery.

This is the short version of its functionality: if you add a Find column in the Quick Find view of, let’s say Accounts, you will be able to search based on that particular column, regardless of the generic fields upon which you usually search.  So you could add the City field to the Quick Find View, and be able to search based on “New York” or “Atlanta,” or even a custom field that you have created yourself on the Account record – in our case, the “Alias” field.

So I navigated to the Quick Find Active Accounts View in the customization area of Accounts…

…clicked Add Find Columns…

…added the “Alias” field to the Quick Find View as a Find column by clicking the Alias field…

…and clicked OK. In order to be more thorough, I added “Alias” as a View column, just to keep the confusion down to a minimum (”Why did I type in Company A and Company B popped up?”).  I saved the Account record and published all of my customizations.

Afterwards, success! I was able to successfully search inside of Accounts based on the “Alias.”  I created a test Account called Corporate Coffee, with an “Alias” called Corner Coffee House.  I searched based on the “Alias,” and successfully returned the record with the Account Name Corporate Coffee.