February 14, 2012 – When do you need to use rollup queries? In part 2 of a series on building product unit sales goals in CRM 2011, I illustrate how rollup queries can be used in combination with other goal criteria, to both narrow and broaden the set of records that roll up to a goal.

December 15, 2011 – The more I use dashboards, the more uses I find for them. Judging by the number of questions I get on the topic, other people are finding them useful as well. This article contains several examples of how Dynamics CRM 2011 dashboards can help you visualize your information and get things done, plus a few dashboard implementation tips.

December 3, 2011 – One-to-Many (or 1:N) relationships are ubiquitous in Dynamics CRM. A reader’s question prompted this article on how to customize the default behavior of 1:N relationships, such as what happens to child records when their parents are assigned, shared and the like.

November 30, 2011 – Now that we’ve got two ways of looking up records in dialog processes, how do you know which approach is better? Here’s a short article with some guidance on that topic, as well as some reflections on why your choice of record type is not as important for dialogs as for workflows. Enjoy!

November 30, 2011 – When you’re using the out of the box data import wizard to import 100,000+ records into Dynamics CRM, you have some spare time on your hands as the import status goes from parsing to transforming to importing, and then all of the records get imported, hopefully all in the Sucesses column. So…I thought I’d catch up on some overdue posting. Here’s a drill-down piece on the new dialog Lookup response type. It’s a followup to an earlier article; this one has more detail and some intuition. Cheers!

October 18, 2011 – Here’s a brief glossary of Dynamics CRM terms and concepts. I find it useful in many situations to have something like this, and I thought you might also. Enjoy.

Oct. 6, 2011 – The second of my two sessions at the recent Extreme CRM 2011 show in Vegas (baby) was “Scalable Goal Management”. This article’s a quick summary of what I talked about, and some drill-down on a couple of good questions from the Q&A.

Oct. 6, 2011 – R7: A little “service update” with plenty of important new features. Gotta love the cloud.

August 23, 2011 – In a previous article I showed how a custom dialog process can substitute for the standard lead conversion process. Here’s an example of a related topic: using a custom dialog process to substitute for the out of the box case resolution process. Enjoy!

August 22, 2011 – Multiple forms per entity are an important new feature in Dynamics CRM 2011. You can target them to specific security roles, so users see the version of the form they need to see. But…you can only target them to security roles for the root business unit, which raises a challenge for “departemental forms” scenarios. Here’s a solution.