Importing Attachments with Notes in Microsoft CRM

Have you ever needed to upload a group of attachments to an entity? Perhaps you are doing a data conversion or starting a new account that needs historical documents attached?

Microsoft CRM allows you to import attachments via a zip file in a few easy steps. Any entity in CRM that has Notes & Attachments enabled can have attachments uploaded to it. With that said, there are a couple things to keep in mind:

• Remember the maximum attachment size defined in the organization settings. Attachments over this size limit will fail during the import.
• The .csv file still needs to be under 8 MBs. Attachments can be larger if the organization setting allows for larger attachments.

This is not an out-of-the-box import map but here is what you can do to accomplish the task:

1. Create a new .csv with these fields: Title, Owner, File Name, Document (actual name of the file), Description, and the entity the notes/attachments are related to. In this example we are uploading notes/attachments related to accounts. The File Name and Document column need to have the exact file name.

2. Create a directory called "attachments" – note it has to be called this. Place all of the attachments specified in the .csv file into this folder.

3. CRM is going to look for a zip file that has the csv file and then a folder called attachments that contains the actual files. This is easily done, but selecting the attachments folder, the csv file, then right click and select send to compressed (zipped) folder. You can name the zip file anything you like.

4. Import the data in CRM by starting "Import Data" and following these directions.

a. Import data – On the first screen you will select the ZIP file (see screenshot below).

b. On the second screen, select the default mapping option (first option) as show here:

c. Choose the "Note" entity

Here is what will come up by default

d. In this example, the column title of my reference entity is called "am_project". Change the am_project to be the lookup to your specified entity and then edit the map.

e. This is going to map the project column in the csv to project name, which is what I want. If you need to change that, use the look up to the right of name.

f. Scroll all the way down and hit OK

g. Now click next

h. And next

i. Click Submit and Finish.

You can see that the files were loaded by opening the project in CRM and clicking on Notes.