Dynamics AX allows you to track the traditional contact details such as phone, fax, url, and email, but what if you want to also track social media accounts like Twitter. Although you could reuse one of the existing electronic contact types, it would be much better if you could have a dedicated contact type just for Twitter so that you can segregate out the data for reporting and analysis. In this worked example I will show you how you can easily add a new contact type to Dynamics AX for Twitter, and also any other Social Media type that you may want to track.
This document is posted to help you gain knowledge. Please leave a comment to let me know what you think about it! Share it to your friends and learn new things together.
Dynamics AX | CRM | Contact Management | Social Media | Twitter
Dynamics AX allows you to track the traditional contact details such as phone, fax, url, and email, but what if you want to also track social media accounts like Twitter. Although you could reuse one of the existing electronic contact types, it would be much better if you could have a dedicated contact type just for Twitter so that you can segregate out the data for reporting and analysis.
In this worked example I will show you how you can easily add a new contact type to Dynamics AX for Twitter, and also any other Social Media type that you may want to track.
The easiest way to find where the contact types are defined is to right mouse click on the Type field in the Contact Information tab of the Contacts form, and select the Personalize option from the context menu.
When the Personalization form is displayed, look in the System name field box, and you will be able to see the table and field that is being used within the form.
In this case it is LogisticsElectronicAddress.Type.
If you open up AOT (Ctrl-D) and navigate to the field then you will see that the field is based on a LogisticElectronicAddressModeType enumeration type. So we need to look somewhere else for the base definition.
When we look in the Base Enums group within AOT, then we will be able to find the enumeration, and expanding it out, we can see that it contains all of the traditional contact types.
Now that we know what to update, we should create a new project as a container for our changes. To do this, select the Project option from the View menu.
If you double click on the new project it will open in it’s own window, and then you can tile the AOT explorer and the Project so that you can see them side-by-side.
Drag the LogisticElectronicAddressMethodTypeenumeration type from the AOT window over to your new project so that we are able to modify the details at the project level.
To add a new Contact Type, right mouse click on the LogisticElectronicAddressMethodType enumeration type and select the New Element option from the context menu.
By capturing all of the social media contact information, and segregating the types out through the new contact types, you start to open up the system to more features.
If you wanted to try extending out further, you could try:
• Creating dynamic fact boxes for contacts that show current social media feeds and activities
• Extend communication to social media in addition to the standard email options
• Analyze the contact activity by cross referencing with Power Query, and charting it with Power View