Project Recipe: Data Essentials for Dynamics

The following is a guideline to follow when using the recipe "Data Essentials for Dynamics". Please read these guidelines before cloning the recipe.

Overview

This recipe provides the following:

• Jobs that clean and normalize data for three Dynamics objects: Accounts, Contacts and Leads.
• Bots to run the above jobs. Note that the bot will be created, but not automated.
• Manual data sources that provide metrics on what field values have been normalized.
• Analytics reports
• An App Factory Dashboard to view the analytics reports containing metrics of cleaning.

Preparation

1. Establish data sources:  A data source must be created for all three Dynamics objects: Accounts, Contacts and Leads. If you already have these data sources, you do not need to create new ones. The data sources need to contain the following attributes:
   1. Accounts: all standard fields as listed in the table below
   2. Contacts: all standard fields as listed in the table below
   3. Leads: all standard fields as listed in the table below
2. Create new data targets: Create a new data target for each object with the following attributes. Note: If you don’t want to update Dynamics with all of these fields, you can customize the export task after the project has been created to update the specific fields desired.
   
   

   Account	Contact	Lead
   accountid	contactid	leadid
   address1_city	address1_city	address1_city
   address1_country	address1_country	address1_country
   address1_line1	address1_line1	address1_line1
   address1_postalcode	address1_postalcode	address1_postalcode
   address1_stateorprovince	address1_stateorprovince	address1_stateorprovince
   address1_telephone1	emailaddress1	emailaddress1
   websiteurl	firstname	firstname
   	jobtitle	jobtitle
   	lastname	lastname
   	telephone1	address1_telephone1
   		websiteurl

Clone

To clone the project recipe, navigate to Projects Recipes and select the project recipe to clone.

You will need to provide:

• Project name
• Prefix and/or suffix for all objects in the project
• Data sources to be used in the project
• Data targets to be used in the project

Examine the cloned project

We recommend you look through all the newly created project elements to familiarize yourself with what has been created.

Look for:

1. Any job that is marked with errors. These errors must be manually corrected.
2. Export tasks that write back to Dynamics. Make changes by unmapping any values that you do not want to write back to Dynamics. Note: Any Export task to Dynamics has been bypassed for your protection. We recommend that you run the jobs with the bypass enabled so you can review any data changes before writing data back to Dynamics.

Run the bot

The first time you run the bots, we strongly suggest you keep the bypass option enabled on all export tasks.

Look at the output from each job, carefully examining your data to make sure it is being transformed correctly and to your standards. Review each export task to verify the mapped attributes are set up correctly.

When you are happy with the job outputs, complete a test run by:

1. Modifying the export task to set a maximum number of records updated. This option is in the Advanced Configuration section of the export task template. We suggest pushing back about 10 records for this test run.
2. Remove the Bypass option on the export task.
3. Remove the filter on the Log to MDS tasks.
4. Run the bot. When the bot is complete, review the records updated by looking at the job outputs and reviewing the attributes: op_export_success and op_export_errors. Please also review the records in Dynamics to verify the changes were made correctly.

Finalize the project

Final steps are:

1. Edit the export task to remove the restriction for the number of records to export.
2. Purge the jobs to prepare for a clean automated run.
3. Edit the Bot to schedule the frequency and enable automation.