Please CRM 2011 Sir, Format My Phone Number

Gayan Perera, 14 October 2010

At Magnetism, we try to make things really easy for Dynamics CRM users, like formatting the address, automatically populating suburb, city, postal code, country by using ajax suggestions, so that the user can go through their daily activities without having to worry about keeping CRM data clean. Especially things like keeping data in a consistent format that an intelligent system can do automatically.

One of the cool things that came up at a recent developer meeting by Roshan and Vitalii is a neat generic phone number formatter they wrote for a customer.

It works by allowing an administrator to specify multiple formats that CRM users enter phone numbers in and then mapping them to a correct output format.

In the example above, Jo Bloggs types in “06841 / 44 - 333 33” into the Business Phone field in CRM, that phone format is specified by the administrator in the Rules section as “0ABCD / EF – GHI JK” and mapped to “+49 ABCD EF-GHIJK”, so when the form is saved the plugin will take that and format it to a nice clean number, in this example: +49 6841 44-33333

Now you can keep your staff happy by not forcing them to do things they don’t like doing, and it might even make them like Dynamics CRM that much more when they see these types of magical powers.