Remember the old days in CRM 4.0 when there was only one type of Picklist? Ahh, life was much simpler then. You could write a workflow that mapped picklist data from one entity to another, No worries.

Now we enter the wonderful world of CRM 2011 and the newly enhanced picklist field that we call “option sets”. (Am I the only one who dislikes that name?) Now we can create a “global” option set and base your entity option set field on a global option set. What a great time saver! Let’s enter the option set values in one place, and all of the entities that need this field can inherit the values from the global one. Cool! those Microsoft engineers are great, aren’t they?
So we upgrade our CRM 4.0 system and turn it up in 2011 and a few weeks later a customer requirement comes in for a new workflow that creates a custom entity record from a Lead before we want to qualify and convert the lead. The requirement includes mapping data from one or more of the Lead’s “picklist”(I mean “option set” in 2011 lingo) fields.
Lo and behold, the workflow designer DOES NOT ALLOW ME to map the Lead option set field to the new entity option set…WHAT!? Yep, that’s right folks, you can’t do it.
A little bit of digging and trial and error gives us the answer, albeit not a very elegant one. In 2011, the only way you can map option set data from one record to another is if both option sets are based on the same global option set!
So, you are left with a couple different choices, each having their own issues:
1.      You can redesign your system to change the local option set fields into new option set fields based on a global option set; and migrate the old field data to the new field data.
2.      You can write a custom workflow action to do it (if you are on CRM On-Premise) and use this step to do the record creation and data mapping
3.      You can write a plugin to do same, and use in either CRM Online or on-premise
4.      Just say the heck with it and tell the users they can’t have it.
Aren’t you glad we now have Global Option Sets in 2011?