Sept. 27, 2010 – Here’s the brief overview of the new workflows features, from my What’s New in CRM 2011 session 1. More details coming soon, in this presentation I focused on what for me is the most obvious new feature, the addition of a (synchronous) user experience, in the form of the “Dialog” category of workflows — er, processes! If you’re wondering what to do with Pages, Prompts and Responses…start here!

Sept. 24, 2010 – Here’s the customization demo from Session #1 of the CRM 2011 What’s New lunch & learn series. I love the new form design environment! Drag and drop, new form sections for headers and footers, drag and drop customization of navigation (no more having to remember where that Display Order is!). Plus I show a couple of other things: the sweet new lookup field, how to filter a lookup…enjoy!

Sept. 23, 2010 — This is the first in a series of webinars I refer to as the CRM 2011 What’s New. In Session 1, I covered some of my favorite features in different areas: the user experience, customization, workflows and system settings. This article includes links to the introduction and the user experience demo. I’ll publish articles over the next few days on the customization, workflows, and system settings topics.

Sept. 16, 2010 – You can set the “Searchable” property of Dynamics CRM fields to fine-tune Advanced Find and create a better search experience for users. But in CRM 4 you can only do one field at a time, and it’s so tedious changing 120 or so fields on the account entity that few people ever actually did it! CRM 2011 fixes this — yay! — by allowing a customizer to do a “bulk edit” on field properties in the sweet new customization UI. Enjoy.

Sept. 11, 2010 — If you have more than a passing interest in Dynamics CRM, you’re probably aware by now that the CRM team delivered on its promise of September availability of the beta version of CRM 2011. The on-premise beta is downloadable now, but unless I’ve been singled out for special treatment, we’re still waiting for the CRM 2011 Online beta.

P.S. — I posted this article on Saturday 9/11. On Sunday I received my onboarding e-mail from the CRM Online team. Coincidence? Yeah, probably.

September 2, 2010 – Sometimes, old-fashioned is the way to go. This is often the case when it comes to many-to-many (or “N:N”) relationships in Dynamics CRM. I’ve had a few questions lately about this, so I wrote up a summary that compares the two main approaches for doing this, and recorded a video on how to create old-fashioned (”manual”) N:N’s. Enjoy!