Contact and lead interaction timeline

What it does

The interaction timeline puts marketing interactions — emails, text messages, push notifications, web activity, form submissions and event activity — onto the same contact or lead timeline control that already carries Sales and Customer Service activity. It is the per-person view that sales and service people actually open, as opposed to the journey-level analytics marketing lives in.

Key facts

Available on contact and lead records. The timeline only shows interactions belonging to the record's own profile type — a contact's timeline carries that contact's interactions and nothing else.
Real-time marketing activity is shown for the past year (changed September 2026). It used to be 90 days, which made the timeline noticeably tighter than the 12 months used by journey, channel and contact insights. The two now line up.
Interactions can be filtered in the control, so "show me every email this person opened" is a two-click operation.
On out-of-the-box contact and lead forms it works with no configuration. On custom forms you have to add a custom connector to the timeline component in the Power Apps maker portal, with constructor msdynmkt_DynamicsMktTimelineInteractionAnalytics.TimelineInteractionAnalyticsResource and resource path msdynmkt_DynamicsMktTimelineInteractionAnalytics, then save and publish.
Read privileges are needed on the underlying tables for anything to appear: msdyncrm_marketingemail, msdynmkt_email, msdynmkt_sms, msdynmkt_pushnotification, msdyncrm_marketingform, msdynmkt_marketingform, msevtmgt_event and msdyncrm_website.
A separate feature shows the exact rendered copy of an email that was sent, enabled under Settings > Feature switches > Contact timeline > "Show exact copy of sent emails".
Those reference copies are retained for one year and only exist for emails sent after the switch was turned on. Nothing is backfilled.
The same rendered messages are reachable programmatically through POST <org>/api/data/v9.0/msdynmkt_EmailRetrieveExactMessages, which needs the timeline feature switch enabled and the prvReadWorkflow privilege, and returns the sent HTML in msdynmkt_emailbody.
The API resolves messages from the EmailSent table, and you normally get the GUIDs it wants (profile, journey, journey run, message template) out of the Fabric shortcut.
Contact and lead insights tabs sit alongside the timeline: Overview, email insights, push notification insights, text message insights, custom channel insights, and website and form insights.

When to use / skip

Turn it on wherever sales or service users are expected to know what marketing has been saying to a customer. It is the cheapest possible win in a Sales-plus-Journeys deployment: a salesperson seeing "opened the pricing email twice yesterday" on the record they were already looking at needs no training and no new app.

The exact-copy feature is a different judgment call. It is genuinely useful for service teams handling "what did you send me" complaints, and for regulated clients who need to evidence what a customer received. It also has a storage and privacy footprint, since you are keeping a rendered copy of every marketing email for a year. Get that past the client's data protection lead before switching it on, not after.

Skip the timeline work entirely if the client has no Sales or Service users in the same environment. If marketing is the only team in Dataverse, the journey-level analytics already tell them what they need and per-contact detail is a curiosity.

Configuration decisions

Whether contacts, leads or both are in scope, and whether the sales team works leads at all — the timeline effort is per form.
Whether custom contact and lead forms are in use, because those need the timeline connector added manually and nobody will notice it is missing until a user complains.
Whether to enable exact copies of sent emails, with a data protection sign-off, knowing the one-year retention and the no-backfill rule.
Which security roles get read access to the eight interaction tables. This is where most "the timeline is empty" tickets come from.
Whether any downstream process needs the email retrieval API, in which case Fabric integration is a prerequisite for getting the GUIDs.
Whether a year of history is enough for the sales conversation, or whether the team needs a Power BI page over the interaction data instead. This is a much easier conversation than it was under the old 90-day window.

Gotchas

The old 90-day window was the single biggest surprise on this feature and it is now gone. If you have written it into a design document, a training deck or a set of UAT scripts, go and correct them — telling users they only get 90 days when they get a year is the kind of stale advice that survives for years.
Custom forms show nothing at all until the connector is added. It fails silently — no error, just an absent section — so it survives UAT easily.
Missing read privileges produce the same silent emptiness. Two different root causes, one symptom, and both look like "the feature doesn't work".
Exact copies only exist from the moment the feature switch is enabled. Turning it on the week before an audit gives you nothing for the period being audited.
Microsoft removed the explicit "no customer profiles" limitation from the documentation in September 2026 without replacing it with a positive statement of support. Until the docs say customer profiles are covered, treat the timeline as a contact and lead feature and don't scope work against Customer Insights - Data profiles on the strength of a deleted sentence.
Rendered email copies age out at one year, so any evidence retention requirement longer than that needs an external archive rather than this feature.
Adding the connector requires publishing the form, which on a customised environment means a solution deployment, not a five-minute change in production.

Consultant notes

Enable the exact-copy switch on day one of the project, even if nobody has asked for it yet. It costs nothing while volumes are low and it is the one setting where being late is unrecoverable.
Demo the timeline to the sales team, not the marketing team. Marketing already has better tools; sales is the audience that changes behaviour because of it.
Add the timeline connector check to your form deployment checklist. It is the most commonly forgotten step when custom contact forms are involved.
Test with a genuinely restricted security role before go-live rather than as a system administrator, since an admin sees everything and proves nothing.
If the client raises retention or evidencing requirements, take that straight to the interaction tables and Fabric. The timeline is a convenience view, not a system of record.

Retention moved to one year in September 2026. Worth another look if Microsoft states positively that interaction timelines cover Customer Insights - Data profiles.