Auditing in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011

Simon Phillips, 09 November 2010

For how long have you wanted to have entities or even singular or multiple fields on a form audited without having it just stored in the notes? Or have a custom entity built and a plugin or workflow to create new records to create an audit history? Well now your wait is over because CRM 2011 is providing an audit log for you out of the box. Brilliant!

Auditing simply means to evaluate something, whether it is a person, organisation, system or process. Undertaking an audit can give you valuable insight into the going-ons within your Dynamics CRM system including when records were edited, what field were changed, who made these changes, and what the previous information was.

Anything that is selected to get audited in CRM will appear in the Audit History menu on every record that you wish to be audited. If you recall from my last blog I mentioned that Auditing was in the settings area if you navigate to this area in here you can configure and manage the auditing tool. If you click into this you will see that there are four options.

Global Audit Settings: this is a link directly to the Audit tab in the system settings menu. It is here that you can turn Auditing on and off, or you can just turn on/off the sales or marketing areas. NB. This is only going to affect system entities.

Entity and Field Audit Settings: this is a link to the Default solution where you can find an entity and turn on/off auditing at the entity level whenever you please.

Audit Summary View: This will give you a list of all changes made to any form/field that has auditing enabled.

Audit Log Management: here you can manage your audit logs by deleting old or unwanted audit logs.

Auditing a form or field can be turned on and off at will for both custom and system entities. This means that if you create a form and forget that you may want some or all of your fields audited you can go back at a later date and change them so that they are.

I hope this has given you a basic insight into this exciting new out-of-the-box feature.