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When you reassign account or contact all activities are also reassigned

Post Author: Joe D365 |

Dynamics CRM 4 is a great tool and for the most part many out of the configurations are good. However, one of those out of the box configuration that should be changed in almost all implementations is the parental relationship between accounts, contacts, and leads and activities.

For example, when you change owner of an account or contact, the default behavior is that completed tasks, emails, complete phone calls will also change owner. This typically is not the desired outcome when we reassign an entity. Ideally we want ONLY the open tasks, emails, phone calls, etc to be reassigned.

This behavior can be changed with a couple very straight forward changes.

  1. Go to settings, customizations, and double click on the lead, account or contact.
  2. Go to the 1 to many relationships and sort by 'Type of Behavior' column. These are the relationship that need to be examined and probably redefine.
  3. The default behavior is to cascade all on assignment. This means when we change an owner of an account/contacts/leads all activities such as all phone calls and sent emails will change owner.
  4. We typically want to change this to: Cascade Active OR none OR user owned.
    Cascade Active – this means the owner of activities (in this case phone calls) only changes when the activities are still open.
    Cascade None – this means the owner of activities (in this case phone calls) will not change. This is not cascade down.
    Cascade User-Owned – this means the owner of activities (in this case phone calls) will only change if also owned by the same owner of the account/lead/contact

After changing the relationship behavior, simply save and publish.

Joe CRM
By Joe D365
Joe D365 is a Microsoft Dynamics 365 superhero who runs on pure Dynamics adrenaline. As the face of PowerObjects, Joe D365’s mission is to reveal innovative ways to use Dynamics 365 and bring the application to more businesses and organizations around the world.

8 comments on “When you reassign account or contact all activities are also reassigned”

  1. This works unless you are trying to change the type of behavior for "Merge" then it is not editable. Is there a way to install a plug in that will preserve the owner of the child records when two accounts are merged? This is seriously affecting our activity data.

  2. Thanks for the tips, very helpful. My problem is that when I reassigned the records to a new owner, that now all of the past activity dates reflect the day I did the transfer. Is there a way around this? Can't be right that you lose the actual dates of your activity history.. Any advice would be appreciated.

    1. I'm having the same problem, I can understand why the owner would change OTB but why would you ever want the completed dates to change. Essentially this ruins the activity feed on the account as you cant tell the difference between an appointment completed yesterday and one completed last year...

      1. Yeah - we agree. What version of crm do you have? In CRM 2016 things look ok now. As long as we re-assign only active activities all completed ones remain the same.

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