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 17 2012 – I surveyed attendees at a recent webinar to find out which topics they’d like to see in future webinars, and the most preferred by a longshot was also the one with the longest name by a longshot: My Top X Fave Business Process Tips & Tricks. Even though my posted survey [...]

February 7, 2012 – Today I had the pleasure of presenting a session at the February meeting of the XRM Virtual User Group, on Advanced Processes in CRM 2011. XRM impressaria Julie Yack kicked off the session with an overview of upcoming CRM events, a summary of what we can look forward to in the CRM Q2 2012 Service Update, and a gracious introduction. The introductee took it from there. Here’s his summary, including plenty of links to the recorded session.

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 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 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!