January 19, 2012 – I get lots of Dynamics CRM questions in my inbox, but rarely as well-articulated as one I received today. A question does not have to be polished to deserve an answer, but if you want it to turn, unedited, into an article, it helps. Forthwith, January’s Dynamics CRM Trick Bag Stump the Experts question, regarding how to use JScript to link records in an N:N relationship.

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!

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 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!

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.

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!

June 21, 2011 – Here’s the second installment of the serialized version of my upcoming book, Building Business Processes in Dynamics CRM 2011. In installment 1, I compared dialogs and workflows, discussed dialog properties, and introduced the most fundamental components of dialogs: Pages, and Prompt and Response pairs. In today’s excerpt I drill down and provide some more detail on how to construct Prompts and Responses. Talk about great beach books — just wait til you get to the part on using hyperlinks in Tip Text!

This topic accounts for about 20% of the total score on the Dynamics CRM 2011 Customization and Configuration exam. Overall, users, teams, business units and security are significantly different in CRM 2011 compared to 4.0. Some of the issues highlighted here have come up a couple of times recently on customer engagements I’ve been working [...]

June 7, 2011, D-Day + 24,091 – You can give reports more prominence by exposing them on Dynamics CRM 2011 dashboards. Here’s an article that explains how to do it for a very useful and often under-appreciated out of the box report, “Activities”, that includes information about activities, grouped by user, activity type and a few other things.