Migrate from Textline to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales

Textline Contact records from the Address Book map to Dynamics 365 Contact. The phone number field becomes Telephone1 or MobilePhone on Contact depending on whether it is the primary or SMS-capable number. Email, name, tags, and notes migrate directly. We use the phone number as a secondary dedupe key alongside email to avoid creating duplicate Contact records when the same person has multiple phone lines in Textline.

Textline conversations are the primary migration object. Each SMS thread maps to a series of Activity records on the Contact timeline. We map each message as either an EmailMessage (for two-way text threads that resemble email behavior) or a Task with a custom sms_direction__c field (inbound/outbound) and a custom sms_content__c field holding the message body. Timestamps and agent attribution are preserved. The Contact is resolved by matching the conversation phone number to Telephone1 or MobilePhone on the Contact record.

Textline Departments group phone lines by location or function. Dynamics 365 does not have a direct Department object at the Contact level, but we map Departments to Teams (for agent grouping and security role assignment) and optionally to Business Units (for org-chart-level isolation on larger deployments). The phone-number-to-department assignment migrates as a custom field textline_department__c on Contact for reference and reporting.

Textline Agents map to Dynamics 365 Users. Agent name and email resolve by email match against the destination User table. Agent-department assignments migrate as Team memberships or as the textline_department__c field on the User record. Permissions and custom roles are documented for manual recreation in Dynamics 365 Security Roles and Field Level Security because these are role-based access control models with different primitives than Textline's agent permissions.

Custom fields on Textline Contacts (Standard and Pro plans) map to custom fields on the Dynamics 365 Contact entity. We pre-create all custom fields in the Dynamics 365 field designer before migration, matching field types (text to Single Line of Text, dropdown to Option Set, date to Date Only). Field-level security is configured to ensure the migration user can write to all custom fields during import. This phase adds one to two days to the timeline per custom field batch.

Tags on Textline Contacts migrate as a multi-select option set or a comma-delimited text field on the Contact record. The customer chooses the strategy during scoping. Tags used for contact classification migrate as a Dynamics 365 Option Set with the tag values as allowed values; tags used for loose categorization migrate as a text field textline_tags__c for maximum flexibility.

Textline canned reply templates migrate to Dynamics 365 Email Templates. Template body text and shortcut codes export from Textline and are re-authored as Dynamics 365 Email Templates with merge fields in the {{fieldname}} format compatible with Dynamics 365 template syntax. We document the shortcut code to merge field mapping so the customer's admin can verify template behavior post-migration.

Textline Announcements (bulk outbound messages) map to Dynamics 365 Campaigns with an inventory document delivered separately. We export announcement history, contact lists used, and message content. In Dynamics 365, the customer creates a Campaign, adds the target Contacts as Campaign Members, and uses Power Automate or a third-party SMS integration (TrueDialog, Twilio via Azure Functions) to send the equivalent outbound messages. We do not send messages from the customer's Dynamics 365 instance as part of migration scope.

MMS attachments referenced in Textline conversation messages export as annotation records in Dynamics 365. We preserve the attachment URL from Textline if the file remains accessible via the Textline API, or we note inaccessible attachments that require re-upload. Dynamics 365 Notes with Annotation store file references or base64-encoded content inline depending on file size.