Aug. 31 — The polls are closed and the votes tabulated in the first annual “Highly Unscientific Dynamics CRM Mobility Solutions” survey, and I summarize them in this article. While I don’t recommend you make investment decisions based on these results, they seemed plausible to me, and anyway, surveys are just plain fun. Enjoy!

Aug 31 — In another article I described how you can use a simple workflow to implement a “record cloning” function in Dynamics CRM. In this article I show an alternative approach which takes advantage of one of the three new kinds of entity relationships you can create in the Dynamics CRM 4.0 version: namely, the ability to create “self-referential” relationships. Combine this with what’s known as “field mapping”, publish your customizations, and bam! Cloning accomplished.

Aug. 29 — Sometimes you need to create multiple records that share a lot of field values. People sometimes refer to this as “cloning” a record, and in Dynamics CRM this requires some customization…but not much. In this article, I show you how to do this with a simple on-demand workflow.

Aug. 29 — At the August meeting of the Dynamics CRM User Group (www.DynamicsCRMUserGroup.com ) we held our second session on Mobility Solutions for Dynamics CRM. Microsoft’s Bob Piskule presented on the Microsoft product, Mobile Express; and Ben Mitchell presented on TenDigits’ flagship product, Mobile Access.

This post contains a summary, some background information, and links to recordings of my intro, and the two main presentations.

Aug. 26 — Keeping to the theme of the Dynamics CRM User Group’s Mobility Solutions So-Hot Summer series, I thought a little survey might be interesting.

Visit the post to take the survey…and don’t forget to register for the August meeting of the Dynamics CRM User Group, featuring Microsoft and TenDigits presenting on their mobile solutions: https://img.leads.dynamicssite.com/DCRMUG-Registration.aspx

Aug. 26 — How do you get both active and inactive records to show up in a Lookup list? Why would you want to? This article shows how to do this for activity records in Dynamics CRM.

Aug. 23 — By default, Dynamics CRM reassigns all child records if you reassign a parent record. This behavior has consequences you might not want, such as reassigning paid invoices and other closed transaction records. In this article I show the easy customization you can use to fix this behavior.

I recently received an interesting email from Bob Haverty, a former student in a CRM class I’d taught a while back. It’s a specific issue having to do with parent-child relationships between quote records, and what happens when the parent record is closed. I’m initially stumped by this one, so I thought I’d post it [...]

In its most recent CRM Software Market Share Analysis report, measuring year over year growth from 2007 to 2008, Gartner found that Microsoft Dynamics CRM was the fastest growing product in the CRM space. Here’s a link to the summary of the study: http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1074615
And since a picture’s worth 1,000 words, I wrote a three-thousand word summary of the study.

If you’ve got Outlook users, you’ve got contact records locked away on desktops that should be shared and cared for in your CRM.