Renaming System Entities in CRM 2011

Roshan Mehta, 22 February 2012

When looking for a system to implement within your business, it is important to consider the impact on how your business will run if you are forced to use the terminology that exists in the software. For example, you might be used to referring to people as “Individuals”, but the software you have implemented forces you to see them as “Contacts”. The customization tools in Dynamics CRM 2011 allow you to rename system entities so you don’t have to change the way you talk business.

Dynamics CRM 2011 uses the term “Account” to refer to other companies your business might work with. These could be customers, suppliers, partners or competitors for example. Let’s assume that your business normally refers to these types of companies as “Organisations” and you wish to rename all instances of the word “Account” to “Organisation”. There are a few areas of the application where you will need to modify the terminology.

Renaming the Entity

The most obvious place to rename “Account” to “Organisation” is within the entity definition. If you navigate to the Account entity definition under Settings > Customization > Customize the System, you will see that you can rename the entity and also change its plural name.

Next we want to rename all fields for the Account entity that use the name “Account”. Expand “Account” in the entities list, and then click on fields. Double-click on a field to modify its display name.

Similarly, we need to do the same for any views configured for the Account entity. Click on Views on the left navigation to see the views configured for the entity and double-click on a view in the list to open up the definition.

Click on View Properties to modify the name of the view.

Now comes the fun part – renaming system messages. While still inside the Account entity definition, click on Messages. Here you will see 80 preconfigured system messages that appear in areas such as error messages. Each of these messages will need a custom display string to be defined in order to keep the terminology consistent throughout the system.

After the terminology in each of these areas has been modified, publish all customizations. Be sure to test that “Account” has been renamed to “Organisations” in all areas of the system. If you have any custom display strings for fields on forms, these might need to be changed within the form editor.