The following is an illustration that shows how Dynamics CRM can be extended in an education-based institute, for example, a typical school.

Mapping the entities: A typical school management application will consist of the following actors:

• Students
• Teachers
• Parents
• Resources, including classrooms, playground, labs, and so on
• Library books

Apart from the aforementioned actors, there will also be the following processes to enable the daily working of the institute:

• Attendance management
• Test evaluation

The first step is to identify whether there is a possibility of mapping any of the existing out-of-box entities for our usage. Based on our analysis, if that is not possible, we will create a new entity.

Dynamics CRM provides CONTACT or CUSTOMER as a standard out-of-box entity. By default, it contains attributes such as the first name, last name, and so on. This entity can easily be mapped to either a Student, a Teacher, or a Parent.

As we are using the same entity for all of the students, teachers, and parents, we can use a picklist attribute with the possible values for students, teachers, and parents, in order to differentiate between them. Let's try and understand how we will achieve this. Check out the following screenshot:

For a data point of view, the Contact entity in Dynamics CRM will be a collection of all the students, teachers, and parents associated with the institute. The following diagram highlights the relationship between them: