September 2, 2010 – Sometimes, old-fashioned is the way to go. This is often the case when it comes to many-to-many (or “N:N”) relationships in Dynamics CRM. I’ve had a few questions lately about this, so I wrote up a summary that compares the two main approaches for doing this, and recorded a video on how to create old-fashioned (”manual”) N:N’s. Enjoy!

August 25, 2010 — If you have a business process that needs to stop, wait for time to pass, and then do something when a date milestone is reached, there’s only one way to do it: with the Timeout function. Unfortunately, it’s a little hard to find, which is probably why this is one of the most frequently asked questions I get about workflows. Here’s a video that demonstrates how to do it.

August 25, 2010 — Will the Upcoming Dynamics CRM 2011 Beta Challenge Salesforce? Did Duane Allman play a mean slide guitar?

August 22, 2010 – Lauren Carlson wrote an article recently that I liked a lot and recommend, “Dynamics CRM Industry Solutions: Our 20 Favorites”. Check it out and let me know what you think. What’s your favorite vertical?

August 6, 2010 – For the next few months, those of us who build on the CRM platform will have what I think of as the “wait or build” decision: If you need to do something that’s going to be significantly easier in CRM 2011, do you wait a few more months until you can get it (more or less) out of the box? Or do you swallow hard and build it now? Based on what I’ve seen so far, here are a few of my recommendations for the “wait” category.

August 2, 2010 – When it comes to maxims, the pithier the better, I always say. Most of the CRM 4 maxims in this article fail the truly pithy test, but I hope they make up for it in usefulness. Let me know what you think.

Fresh from the recent Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, here’s Bryan Nielson’s presentation on what’s new in the next release of Dynamics CRM, interspersed with demos by Andrew Bybee. Some of the new features in the transition from CRM 3.0 to 4.0 had a significant impact on development and customization techniques, and how we allocated our time to most efficiently utilize the new features. With the rapid growth of the XRM platform this will be an even bigger deal this time around, and this video is the most substantive sneak preview.

The terms “customizing” and “extending” are code-words for “getting Dynamics CRM to do more stuff than it does out of the box”. They’re actually pretty well-defined concepts, however, and here’s my attempt at summarizing the concepts and clarifying what we mean by extending Dynamics CRM.

July 6, 2010 – Dynamics CRM entities can have one form only, which seems limiting at first. But you can still create a custom view of a form based on a user’s security role and other factors. This article demonstrates a role-tailored opportunity form and includes copy & pastable JavaScript and instructions.

July 6, 2010 – People usually think “process” when they think “workflows”, but Dynamics CRM workflows can be helpful in lots of little ways that add up to big time savings. Here are some examples of a utility workflow to perform “intelligent data updates” when bulk edit or other techniques can’t do the job.