I’m excited to be presenting at the second Extreme CRM show, in Las Vegas from October 2nd through the 5th. This year I assisted my colleagues Ray Beste of Sikkich and Matt Parks of Avanade in coming up with the sessions and the speaker selection process, so I can say with some confidence that it’s [...]

August 4, 2011 – Variables are an important new construct available only in CRM 2011 dialog processes, and store values during the life of a process. They’re good for calculated fields, running sums and the like. In Installment 9 of the serialized version of my upcoming book, I describe how they work and present a highly scientific method of using them to score an opportunity record. Enjoy!

August 2, 2011 – One reason to call a child dialog is to let a user do the same thing again: that’s recursion, and I explained that in Installment #7. Another reason is reuse: call the same child process from several different parent processes. And that, my friend, is the topic of Installment #8 of my upcoming book, Building Business Processes in Dynamics CRM 2011.

August 1, 2011 – Recursive dialogs are simpler than recursive workflows, which probably accounts for why Installment 7 from my upcoming book (Building Business Processes in Dynamics CRM 2011) is so short. I also include a link to a video. Enjoy!

July 27, 2011 – Here’s Installment 6 of my upcoming book, “Building Business Processes in Dynamics CRM 2011″. This one is from a chapter I call “Business Processes in the Real World”, which builds on the previous chapters and basically consists of lots of examples of useful workflows and dialogs. This one’s about using dialogs to create, convert and close records, and while it’s probably too long for a blog post, I wanted to cover the entire topic. Enjoy!

July 20, 2011 – Security roles are an (obviously!) important part of the security model in Dynamics CRM. This article explains security roles, how they fit into the overall security model, and covers some of the trickier concepts and most frequent questions I get on the topic.

July 15, 2011 – Recently I’ve had several questions on the general topic of “locking down” charts and dashboards. By default, all CRM 2011 users can see all system dashboards, and they can all create personal charts and dashboards. If you need to customize these settings, you will probably find this article interesting!

7/11/11 – The CRM 2011 core certification exams are out, and this article will become my repository for information about them. Starting with the basics, here are links to the Microsoft exam pages, a little commentary, and some related content.

June 28, 2011 – In Installment 5 of my upcoming book, Building Business Processes in Dynamics CRM 2011, I cover an important topic for customizers: calling dialog processes with a URL.

June 27, 2011 – In Installment 4, I cover the important topic of how to query CRM data in CRM 2011 dialog processes. Cheers!