March 14, 2010 – I get asked about round-robin lead assignment in Dynamics CRM a lot. It almost qualifies as a meme, at least my own little personal meme. Here’s a short video about a technique first described by Ben Vollmer on the MS Dynamics CRM team blog.

March 13, 2010 – Even I can’t come up with a Dynamics CRM tie-in for this article…but I wanted my Mom to have a reason to go to my blog apart from the fact that I’m her son. So, Mom: I hope you enjoy these pictures I took during Bridget’s and my walk on Second Beach last summer.

March 7, 2009 – Here are the add-on vendors we’ve featured at DCRMUG. Links to articles on their presentations are included in the sidebar, and many of those articles include links to the recorded session. Also: most of them will be at Convergence 2010, so block off your schedule now and join us in Atlanta!

Feb. 25, 2010 – Recently I ranted a little about my experience in upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 7, specifically about how changes in browser settings impacted my Dynamics CRM experience. One thing I’ve learned about Microsoft program managers is they care enough about their programs to reach out to to ranters like me, and this episode was no exception: I got a call the next day from Matt Hooper, a program manager on the Dynamics CRM Online team, and he was patient enough to set me right. As soon as I got off my call with Matt, I thought I better write down what he told me, so I wouldn’t forget. Thanks Matt!

Feb. 22, 2010 – I’m the #1 Fan of Dynamics CRM Online. And I like Windows 7 a lot. But I do NOT like the way IE 8 on Windows 7 runs Dynamics CRM Online…and unfortunately that’s an important and hard to troubleshoot combination! Does it really work? Well…I guess it depends on what you mean by “work”…

February 7, 2010 – How do you take the information submitted on a web form and pop it into Dynamics CRM? This feature – sometimes referred to generically as “web-to-CRM”, or “lead-to-CRM” – is not included in Dynamics CRM 4.0 on-premise, but has been added to Dynamics CRM Online. The built-in approach in the cloud version is better than nothing, but there’s a better solution, Web2CRM from CRMInnovation, if you’re willing to spend $495.

February 7, 2010 – Dynamics CRM is the best place to store your customer information, and track all of your sales, marketing and service interactions with them. Unfortunately, it’s not the best place to perform some of those interactions, such as e-mail. Yes, it’s fine for tracking one-off e-mails (especially if you’re using the Outlook client), but when it comes to e-mail marketing, the out-of-the-box features of Dynamics CRM leave plenty to be desired. What we need is e-mail marketing integrated with Dynamics CRM. There are more options all for this all the time, and here’s an article where I discuss integrations for both Exact Target and Constant Contact, and my recent experience with the Constant Contact integration

Jan. 26, 2010 — Dynamics CRM is a great product, but it’s got some feature gaps. One of the big ones is in e-mail marketing. Hosted e-mail marketing services fill the gap, but it’s a total hassle sending e-mails from a completely separate application! Here’s an introduction to a solution that integrates Dynamics CRM and Constant Contact: C-Cubed from Zero2TenCRM.

Jan. 18, 2010 – In life, many-to-many relationships are recipes for pandemics. In Dynamics CRM they aren’t quite as bad, but they can be confusing until you get used to them. This article is about the Dynamics CRM variety, although if you prefer the epidemiological I include a link to an article about those.

Jan. 15, 2010 — In the month after our December meeting, we received 23 reponses to our first annual membership survey of the Dynamics CRM User Group. I don’t know what the threshold is for statistical reliability, but what the heck: surveys are fun! Plus, this one was done right in Dynamics CRM (I’ll write a separate article on the how-to of surveys in CRM). Forthwith, the results…