In part 1 of this 2-part series, I demonstrated how to use the CRM 4.0 Report Writer to create charts that illustrate how your data are distributed across categories. It’s relatively straightforward when you’ve got numeric data that can be “summarized”, but a little less obvious when you don’t.
For example, what if you want a [...]

Dynamics CRM does not have a built-in “calculated” field type, but you can use workflows and the Multiply by and Set to operators to get something close to it. For example, the Opportunity entity has built in attributes “Est. Revenue” (attribute name “estimatedvalue”) and “Probability” (attribute name “closeprobability”). Suppose you wanted a “probability-weighted” revenue forecast. You can create [...]

Charting CRM Data Across Categories
You can use the CRM 4.0 Report Writer to easily build graphical summaries of your Dynamics CRM data across categories: accounts by owner or territory, sales by product or pipeline stage, etc.
In my case, however, this only seemed “easy” once I understood how the report writer works! (funny how often it works like [...]

I’ve written a few times about integrating Internet marketing into your overall Dynamics CRM marketing efforts. In particular, one of the big gaps in the traditional feature set was the lack of a web-to-lead function so real “marketing types” could capture leads from a web form directly into Dynamics CRM…without having to write code to [...]

 In a recent article on the Dynamics CRM Team Blog, Ben Vollmer outlined an approach for assigning Leads on a “round-robin” basis, first one to rep a, second to rep b, etc. I’d been asked about this a few times so I was glad to see Ben’s excellent solution. When I tried to implement it, however, I found it a [...]

If you’re a frequent reader of the Trick Bag you may have noticed a recent spate of articles about Dynamics CRM workflows. Most of these and many more to come are examples taken from a book I published on www.Lulu.com (If you aren’t familiar with lulu, it’s a “self-publishing” site where you can publish pretty much [...]

Assigning Records Using Queues? Everybody knows you can’t do that!

As all well educated CRMers know, only a limited number of record types in Dynamics CRM (Cases and Activity records, to be precise) can be assigned to a Queue. When a user “accepts” a record from a queue, the record is assigned to that user. [...]

I know — not a very sexy title, but this can be a confusing issue, and it has plenty of applications if you need to create automatic workflows in CRM. The basic issue is this: if you have an automatic workflow that should only run for SOME users but not all users, how do you do that? [...]

Using the BDC in SharePoint
Once you’ve got the application definition file properly imported into your MOSS 2007 Shared Services Provider, using it within SharePoint is pretty easy. (again, this assumes you have some familiarity with SharePoint, know how to edit pages and use Web Parts! Apologies in advance if you don’t, but to keep the [...]

The Dynamics CRM 4.0 Enterprise Search Accelerator allows you to integrate Dynamics CRM 4.0 into a SharePoint deployment, in two main ways: by extending SharePoint search to include Dynamics CRM as a searchable content source, and by allowing you to use a set of special web parts to expose lists of Dynamics CRM entities on [...]