Book Publishing Ain’t What It Used To Be
It’s a lot easier. I just published the Second Edition of my book, Building Workflows in Dynamics CRM 4.0. I used the “self-publishing” site, www.Lulu.com, and although I’m happy to report that the publishing part is a lot easier nowadays, the part about writing good content is as difficult [...]

Use a Custom Audit Entity and a Simple Workflow to Find Out
I’ve always liked lists: shopping lists, birthday gift lists, to-do lists, top ten American League hitters by different categories, you name it. One of my current favorite list types is the Dynamics CRM Marketing List. (I’m sure you wondered where I was going with [...]

Summary
The “CRM” in Dynamics CRM stands for customer relationship management, and indeed the 4.0 release is an excellent application for CRM. It comes pre-configured with excellent “out of the box” support for four important functional areas: sales, marketing, service management and service scheduling. It’s a web-based platform based on the .NET 3.0 Framework, sports tight [...]

Recently I’ve been authoring practice test questions for the three core CRM 4 certification exams. I’ve got LOTS of other articles on the exams and how to prepare for them in the certification category; in this post I wanted to focus on the practice tests only, so they aren’t buried somewhere deep in a post.
Links to [...]

When it comes to mail merge in Dynamics CRM 4, the Outlook client is your best option.
Here’s a “ten-minute tip” video on the topic I posted on YouTube. I hope you learn something from it, and let me know if you have any questions.

Sometimes What’s NOT there is What’s Important!
In Dynamics CRM it’s possible to delete Opportunity and Case records. (This might sound trivially obvious, but in fact there are many kinds of records that cannot be deleted, such as User, Business Unit, and others.) Even though a well-designed implementation will use security roles to guard against the [...]

May 8 — InsideView is an amazingly useful tool for prospecting accounts, and contacts at those accounts. They’ve got a great pricing model, the tool can sit inside an IFRAME on your Account or Lead forms, and if you need to prospect, I highly recommend you check it out. In this article I explain why it just might be the “ultimate CRM mashup”.

Back in the old good days, Microsoft Learning used to have some practice tests for the Dynamics CRM 4.0 certification exams. For a long time they were a staple of the CRM 4.0 training & certification bootcamps I ran for Microsoft: at the end of one of the classes I’d walk through them, ask the students [...]

I’ll admit I’m skeptical about the value of market share. Here are just a few reasons not to put excessive focus on it:

Various definitions of ”the market” are essentially arbitrary, and share measures will be highly dependent on these definitions.
What are the important metrics? Revenue? Seats? Server licenses? Different vendors have different licensing models, and when you [...]

A BPOS Story with a Happy Ending
One of the first articles I posted on the re-launched Dynamics CRM Trick Bag was a bit of a rant about the Microsoft product Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS, for short). This is Microsoft’s “cloud computing” suite of hosted Exchange, SharePoint and Live Meeting. I had a heck of [...]