December 31, 2011 – One of the most obvious applications of dialog processes are scripted conversations. And one of the most obvious examples of a scripted conversation is a survey. Dialog processes work great for all kinds of surveying and profiling requirements, and that’s what this special New Year’s Eve edition of the Dynamics CRM Trick Bag is all about. And for the record, without intending any disrespect to the Mayans, I think 2012 is going to be an excellent 365-day year!

December 14, 2011 – Everybody agrees that user adoption is a good thing, and that high user adoption is a key measure of the overall success of a CRM implementation. But how can you measure “user adoption?” This article describes a simple approach, combining a couple of customizations and a few workflows, to come up with a single metric by which users can be ranked. And for best results, don’t tell your users you’re measuring their activity!

December 12, 2011 – The Dynamics CRM literature is replete with articles about round-robin schemes to assign records. It turns out to be easier to implement processes like this with dialogs than with workflows, because a dialog process can extend its data context as it runs. Here’s an example. Enjoy!

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!

November 20, 2011 – Unlike workflows, dialog processes have a form-based UI, and like other forms in Dynamics CRM, they can be accessed directly by a URL. Sometimes the best way to expose these to users is from a link on a dashboard. This article explains how to do that dynamically, so a click on the link will always run the dialog as the current user. Enjoy, and Happy Thanksgiving!

October 10, 2011 – Um…I’ve been kinda busy lately so I didn’t quite finish my book (Building Business Processes in Dynamics CRM 2011) over the summer. I will before winter, though. Anyway, here’s installment 12, which extends installment 5, and shows how to build a dashboard that calls a user dialog with a dynamically-generated URL.

August 27, 2011 – Here’s a short article on how to use Process Templates to make copies of workflows or dialogs. Making the copy is easy — making it do something useful is the harder part. Enjoy!

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 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!