If you are a CRM consultant you already understand all about GUIDS. If you are a GP consultant then GUID’s may be a mystery.

In Dynamics CRM all entity records are tracked by a unique identifier called a GUID. For GP folk this is very similar to the concept of a GL account number and an account index. To reference an account number in the GP tables you often need to know the index. This concept is fundamental to CRM, and pervasive across the product.

What this menas is that if you were to try and write data directly into the CRM tables you need to pass in the GUID’s into the table. The problem with this is that no source data file will contain GUID’s as they not something end users will know about or understand.

SmartConnect resolves this issue by providing the concept of an entity lookup. The entity lookup is defined during the building of a map and says “for each value in this field, go and lookup CRM to find the GUID, then pass the GUID value into the integration rather than the actual entity record. So whether you are dealing with a standard entity or a custom entity you can always use the entity lookup.

This is another way in which SmartConnect makes integrating CRM and GP easy for all consultants.