Dynamics 365 CRM Issue/Bug with Note and Activity when parent record Owner is re-assigned

Recently, I discovered a quite annoying issue in Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement related to Note and Activities (eg. Email, Phone Call, etc).

Account or Contact may have notes and activities such as emails, phone calls, etc. Here below, TheCompany has few Notes and an Email in the Timeline.

Then, I go assigning TheCompany to a new Owner. You would notice that those Notes and emails received or sent few days ago then display as if they have just been modified. It is certainly a system behaviour that is undesirable. We would expect those Notes and activity records to remain as how it was chronologically before the Owner was assigned.

Such behaviour occurs due to how the relationship between the Note and Activity entities and its parent (eg. Account or Contact) is configured by default. The relationship is Parental that all child records will be automatically re-assigned to the Owner when the owner is changed.

Fortunately, there is a way to fix this issue, that is by correcting the relationship behaviour.

Navigate to make.powerapps.com where we can customise the Dynamics 365 solution. From your Solution, add the Note and activity entities you would like to fix, eg. Email. Add all Relationship components when adding the entities.

When you try to edit the Parental relationship, eg. between the Note and Account, you will find that the options are locked.

Luckily, we can use the classic user interface instead. Navigate back to All, then click on Switch to Classic.

New window will appear, then navigate to the N:1 Relationship of Note or activity entity. Then double click to open the relationship we want to edit. As we are updating the notes appearing in the Account's Timeline, we would edit the relationship where Account is the Primary Entity.

Then change the Type of Behaviour from Parental to Configurable Cascading. Depending on your business need, you may change both Assign and Reparent from Cascade All to either Cascade None or Cascade Active. In my case, Cascade None works best that no Note and Email records will ever be changed to new Owner when the parent Account record is assigned to a new owner.

Simply repeat this process for each parent entity, such as Contact, as needed. Also, repeat for each activity entities, such as Phone Call, Task, etc as needed.

That's all for now.