Most organizations use Dynamics CRM to track their Accounts and Contacts, but they also track other companies with whom they work. It's common to use the Relationship Type field on the Account to indicate that a company is a Partner, Consultant, Investor or Vendor. That way it is easy to create a View that filters the data based on the type of Account. But wouldn't it be great to have its own menu item on the left navigation in CRM? By modifying the site map and adding some parameters from a View, we can accomplish this task!

In this example, we are going to use the Account entity and the out-of-the-box relationship type field.

1. Create a new View that will have filter of relationship type = Vendor. This can be a System View (recommended) or a Personal View. If you do use a Personal View, make sure you share the View with the appropriate user who will need to have access to this menu.

2. Once the view has been created and published, we need to grab a couple of pieces of information. Go to the Accounts entity and pull up the view that we created in step 1. Select the Copy a Link and select the Current View option.

3. Now copy that link to a notepad, as we will need some information from that link. Below is an example of what it would look like.

Active Vendors

4. The next step is that we need to export the existing site map. Go to Settings, Customizations and Solutions. From here, you can create a new solution. Provide a display name, publisher and a version. Then click Save.

5. After the screen refreshes, we can select the "Add Existing" and then select the site map. Once the site map has been added, we can select "Export Solution" from the top menu. That will walk you through a wizard and allow you to save that solution to your local PC.

6. Locate the solution file we exported in the above step, and extract files that are included in the zip file.

7. Find the Customizations.xml file and open this file in Notepad, Notepad ++ or Visual Studio. (If possible, Visual Studio or Notepad ++ are the best program to make these changes.) This will give you the ability to make sure there are no errors in your XML file before uploading it back to CRM.

8. In this example, we want the new menu item to be displayed under My Work and under the sub-section of Customers. In the customizations.xml file, find a Group ID of "Customer".

9. Copy the information below to the XML right below the SubArea for Contacts.