May 6, 2012 – Today’s episode wraps up the remarkable five-year run of the best podcast ever, Mike Duncan’s The History of Rome. Here’s my tribute, in words and xRM.

April 24, 2012 – This article describes how to use a custom entity to store information regarding service level agreements, and how to use a workflow to populate a case with information for a specific SLA. This is an example of a more general technique, and I conclude with a brief discussion of how you could extend it to other scenarios.

April 23, 2012 – An article I wrote some time ago about CRM 2011 security roles is consistently the most popular on my blog. Judging by the questions I get, a few topics could stand more clarification, and they are the topics of this article and the accompanying video.

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!