Business Data Auditing Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online

Article
06/26/2009

The Business Data Auditing Accelerator provides basic audit capabilities for organizations using Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The accelerator takes a snapshot of a record whenever the relevant event occurs within the system such as Create, Update, Assign and Delete. Through workflow, auditing can be configured for any entity and any trigger event.
NOTE: This Accelerator will work with both the On-Premise and Online editions of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.

The following text is taken from the Business Productivity Business Data Auditing Accelerator Deployment Guide contained within the download for the accelerator.

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How does the accelerator work?

The Business Data Auditing accelerator utilizes the workflow platform of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Depending on what operations within your CRM system that you want to audit you can tailor the workflows accordingly. The basis of the accelerator is very simple: for each entity that is open to auditing there is a separate snapshot or audit entity, e.g. if you want to switch on auditing for accounts then there is an account audit entity supplied with the accelerator. Depending on what events you want to audit (create, update, assign or delete) then the workflows will create a copy of the current record in the relevant audit entity. This then means that you have a copy of each relevant change to the record during its life.

Because it is based on workflow definitions it is very easy to extend and configure exactly the information you wish to audit and what events within the system will trigger an audit to be recorded.

Out of the box the accelerator contains audit entity definitions and workflows to audit the following entities:

Account	Contact	Lead	Case
Contract	Opportunity	Quote	Order
Invoice	Campaign	User

You can easily tailor the workflows to cater for any custom entities you have defined in your system (see the “How do I configure and extend the auditing capabilities?” section within the Business Productivity Business Data Auditing Accelerator Deployment Guide).
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Since the accelerator uses custom entities to store the modifications and workflows to add the changed values to the custom entities it will work 100% with CRM Online. I installed and tested the Business Data Auditing Accelerator with CRM Online. Below are some screenshots of the functionality.

Contact record creation