April 24, 2011 – If you ever wonder what the correct answer is to the question “Do you want to view only the webpage content that was delivered securely?”, it’s “No”. In this article, I describe how to make the question go away.

April 20, 2011 – There are lots of ways you can visualize data in Dynamics CRM 2011. Dashboards are great, but as Barry Givens pointed out in my favorite Convergence session, they aren’t the only way to create dashboard-style visualizations. You can also use the new multiple forms per entity functionality to create what I call “record-centric” dashboards, like the account dashboard I show in this article.

April 14, 2011 – Another year, another great Convergence. Here’s my summary. Enjoy!

March 27, 2011 – Dialog processes give you an important new way to create flexible, interactive business processes in Dynamics CRM 2011. In this article I provide a quick review of the new functionality they support and contrast them with the traditional workflow process, which are still available and function much the same as they did in the previous version. After reviewing the basics, I cover something that might seem a little confusing at first, but that turns out to be important: how you can create queries of Dynamics CRM data within your dialogs, and how you can make one query dynamically dependent on the results of a previous one.

April 8, 2011 – You’ve installed Dynamics CRM 2011 on a fresh set of Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 64-bit servers, and successfully performed a test migration on your CRM 4.0 production organization. After a couple weeks of testing, you perform another migration to pick up all of the new data entered in 4.0, and eventually you get this message: “you have already imported and upgraded this organization and cannot perform the operation again…” What do you do?

April 5, 2011 – Because of limitations of the opportunity record type in CRM 4.0, many organizations had to take an ad-hoc approach to pricing with the “user provided” pricing method. In CRM 2011, a seemingly small improvement in opportunities can allow you to realize the benefits of “system calculated” pricing. In this article I explain why you might want to reconsider the way you price your deals in Dynamics CRM 2011.

April 1, 2011 – The Dynamics CRM 2011 upgrade is a juggernaut, partly because it’s a great product at a significantly lower price point than its competitors, and partly because of solid, aggressive marketing. Apparently the marketing’s going to get cranked up another notch or two: I’ve learned recently of ongoing discussions to release branded client versions of Dynamics CRM on two of Microsoft’s hottest devices: the Windows Phone 7 and the KinectXBOX add-on.