Customer entity and Staff entity?

[TMacG]

Hi, 

This is a basic question but I'm struggling to make a decision about it, I hope you can help me.

I am using the contact entity model for our customers, it has their details and the type of customer they are i.e. Student, Pilot, Tenant, Candidate.

All of our staff are M365 Users and at one stage or another, they were students and or pilots.

Do I need a separate entity for Staff or simply another contact type to the contact entity?

[Jmanriquerios]

Hi @TMacG 

Your question is solved by other questions that you should ask yourself depending on what you need in your relational model and data mining.

For example if you use the users table and these M365 users will be inside your application as users of the application, what does this mean that they can be owners of records, belong to business units or teams. And if they have Power Apps license they can enter the application.

Now if it is to describe a type of person that represents a record within the system and does not have to enter into the platform it is best to create it as a contact, even if they exist as users. This is because they would have different purposes

I would use the entity contact for all the people that I relate to make the transactions of the application and the entity users for the users of the system.

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[EricRegnier · Accepted solution]

Hi @TMacG,

Good question, in general and best practice is to separate them. The same individual can exist in the two tables, but strictly as different context: staff and customer. The customer row will have the personal email and staff the organization email. For staff you can reuse the User (systemuser) table or Entra ID User (a virtual table to Entra ID / AAD). Here are some tips on best practice, see #5 from https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Apps-Community-Blog/Top-15-best-practices-when-configuring... 

Hope this helps!

[SteRe]

Hi @TMacG ,

I'd like to agree to the two answers before. You have two scenario: customer and stuff, so keep it separated. But if there is a need to know a specific customer is also part of your own organization (and if this is allowed to store by data privacy considerations) you could link both entities. You either might like to setup a lookup or, a little more generic, go for a connection between two records presenting the same person. 

[EricRegnier]

Data privacy regulations (eg GDPR and others) is important part. You might not want to link them for these reasons, especially in financial, insurance, public and health industries. You'll might need more effort to apply the right security controls if linked. Just something to consider, cheers for bringing this up @SteRe 

[TMacG]

Hi @EricRegnier ,

That makes perfect sense, thank you.

Thank you also for the link to best practices.

TMacG