Custom Tables for CRM prospects

Finance and Operations/AX Developer Forum
1

So, I’m new to the AX Development world. I have experience in custom website and SharePoint development. I’ve read the 4 ‘Introduction to Ax Development’ documents

We are a national retailer, and it seems that the standard AX CRM module doesnt meet our needs.

For example, we currently have a list of about 70,000 individuals we would like to market to and most will never become our customers. We consider them ‘Prospects.’

I dont want to upload these prospects into our GlobalAddressBook. They just don’t belong there.

However, I would like to upload this list of contact info into AX so that we can keep our data centralized and utilize our small base of IT talent / resources. I think this will benefit us especially when creating reports that return customer data as well as ‘prospect’ data.

So, it seem that creating a few tables in AX would be an innocous approach. However, I am struggling with the upload process. Specifically, the linking of tables. Basically, I want to replicate the DirParty, Address, and DirPartyDetail tables.

My questions and confusion concern the id fields that link the tables together. If I use AX for this, can I not use the AutoIncrement feature of SQL server? Do I have to use the NumberSequence thingy? Am I then handcuffed to the NumberSequence thingy?

Can I setup a NumberSequence for my custom tables? how?

Assuming I can get that to work, I assume I can use this :

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/960729

to figure out how to link a prospect contact name record in the ‘ProspectParty’ table to my ‘ProspectPartyDetail’ table.

Am I doing this right???

TIA,
JT

2

Why would you not use the business relation tables to hold this information at a business level marked as a prospect and the contacts linked to each of these? I would suggest you reassess the CRM requirements against AX or give us more detail around why it does not meet your needs, why you would not use the GAB (importing contacts could potentially auto-update this to centralise it) and why you would replicate what is already there in new tables. Sounds to me like you are reinventing something that is already there.