January 26, 2012 – Today I had the pleasure of co-presenting a webinar with John Gravely and Matt Wittemann of ClickDimensions, with the snazzy title, “CRM MVPs Reveal Best Practices: What Works in Marketing Automation”. Not only was the title good, but I thought the session was as well. Here’s a a summary of my part of the webinar, and a link to the recorded session.

January 19, 2012 – I get lots of Dynamics CRM questions in my inbox, but rarely as well-articulated as one I received today. A question does not have to be polished to deserve an answer, but if you want it to turn, unedited, into an article, it helps. Forthwith, January’s Dynamics CRM Trick Bag Stump the Experts question, regarding how to use JScript to link records in an N:N relationship.

December 31, 2011 – One of the most obvious applications of dialog processes are scripted conversations. And one of the most obvious examples of a scripted conversation is a survey. Dialog processes work great for all kinds of surveying and profiling requirements, and that’s what this special New Year’s Eve edition of the Dynamics CRM Trick Bag is all about. And for the record, without intending any disrespect to the Mayans, I think 2012 is going to be an excellent 365-day year!

December 15, 2011 – The more I use dashboards, the more uses I find for them. Judging by the number of questions I get on the topic, other people are finding them useful as well. This article contains several examples of how Dynamics CRM 2011 dashboards can help you visualize your information and get things done, plus a few dashboard implementation tips.

December 14, 2011 – Everybody agrees that user adoption is a good thing, and that high user adoption is a key measure of the overall success of a CRM implementation. But how can you measure “user adoption?” This article describes a simple approach, combining a couple of customizations and a few workflows, to come up with a single metric by which users can be ranked. And for best results, don’t tell your users you’re measuring their activity!

December 12, 2011 – The Dynamics CRM literature is replete with articles about round-robin schemes to assign records. It turns out to be easier to implement processes like this with dialogs than with workflows, because a dialog process can extend its data context as it runs. Here’s an example. Enjoy!

December 7, 2011 – A long time ago I wrote an article, My Dynamics CRM 5 Wish-List, on some of the features I most wanted to see in the next release of Dynamics CRM. I received plenty of comments and emails about that post, but these days if I really feel strongly about a feature I use the Microsoft Connect site: https://connect.microsoft.com.

December 3, 2011 – One-to-Many (or 1:N) relationships are ubiquitous in Dynamics CRM. A reader’s question prompted this article on how to customize the default behavior of 1:N relationships, such as what happens to child records when their parents are assigned, shared and the like.

December 3, 2011 – I recently began using ClickDimensions for my crm-centric marketing automation solution, and it’s been working great. This article summarizes the primary benefits of marketing automation add-ons for Dynamics CRM, and uses ClickDimenions examples to illustrate. Enjoy!

November 30, 2011 – Now that we’ve got two ways of looking up records in dialog processes, how do you know which approach is better? Here’s a short article with some guidance on that topic, as well as some reflections on why your choice of record type is not as important for dialogs as for workflows. Enjoy!