Automatic Case Creation Gotcha: Keep the predefined fields as it is.

Recently I’m working in a CRM Online environment with CRM 2015 Update 1. One of the use case that I’m working on is Email to Case. I read through the article from Microsoft to get this functionality worked: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics/crm-customer-center/automatically-create-a-case-from-an-email.aspx.

One of the gotcha that I encountered is that when I’m configuring the record creation rule and creating a case record, some of the fields are pre-populated with some weird mapping (null(Channel Properties)):

And when I tried to map some of these fields to something else, for example I map the stakeholder to the email sender and clear out the value from Contact field, I usually encounter a failure in the case creation process:

The error description is apparently showing up that the contact in “Contact” field does not belong to the customer in my “Stakeholder” field. And when I tried to open the Create: Case properties, I found out that the Contact field is not cleared out in the automatic case creation workflow:

So, as a workaround. I need to let the pre-defined field to work as it is. It will then resolve the Case creation mapping as the following logic:

IF the sender belongs to an account

• Set the Customer to the email sender’s parent account and set the sender in the Contact field.

ELSE

• Set the Customer to the email sender’s contact record.

Apparently there is an KB article that related to this: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3094208. Thanks to Feng Wang from Microsoft support to point out to this article.

7. Click on Set Properties and re-add any custom mappings. The out-of-box Customer and Contact fields will automatically populate to {null(Channel Properties)}. This value must remain, in order for the Email resolution to correctly correlate to the Contact or Account. If this value is changed, it cannot be reset manually and the Create Case step must be deleted and recreated again.

HTH!