August 25, 2010 — If you have a business process that needs to stop, wait for time to pass, and then do something when a date milestone is reached, there’s only one way to do it: with the Timeout function. Unfortunately, it’s a little hard to find, which is probably why this is one of the most frequently asked questions I get about workflows. Here’s a video that demonstrates how to do it.

July 6, 2010 – People usually think “process” when they think “workflows”, but Dynamics CRM workflows can be helpful in lots of little ways that add up to big time savings. Here are some examples of a utility workflow to perform “intelligent data updates” when bulk edit or other techniques can’t do the job.

June 22, 2010 – This is a more complete treatment of two closely related topics: in Dynamics CRM 4.0, how to use Wait/Timeout conditions in recursive workflows. I use a common business process to illustrate: if a sales opportunity gets stale, how can you send a series of reminders, and eventually close out the opportunity record if nothing gets done?

June 8, 2010 – Advanced Find is a foundation skill in Dynamics CRM, and it comes in handy in pretty much every aspect of using, configuring and customizing the platform. Locating records, maintaining marketing lists, creating reports, customizing views, exporting to Excel, sharing records, creating duplicate detection rules, doing mail merges…and lots of other things all benefit from a solid working knowledge of Advanced Find. One of those other things is workflows, another of my favorite topics, and here are a few examples of how you can use Advanced Find to figure out what’s going on with your workflows.

June 2, 2010 – 1. Dynamics CRM workflows have built-in functionality to wait…but in order to loop you must recurse. 2. Dynamics CRM workflows have built-in functionality to wait…but in order to loop you must recurse. A little recursion humor for you. And if you appreciate that, you may also like this article on the topic!

April 21, 2010 – Unlike on demand workflows, which rely primarily on your security role to determine if you can run them, automatic workflows rely mainly on a workflow setting referred to as “Scope”. Here’s a short explanation and a 10-minute video on the topic.

April 18, 2010 – Whether you will be able to see and run a Dynamics CRM on demand workflow is determined mainly by your security role, and is also effected by where within your CRM organization the workflow’s owner sits. In this article and the accompanying video I do my best to de-confuse a confusing topic.

March 14, 2010 – I get asked about round-robin lead assignment in Dynamics CRM a lot. It almost qualifies as a meme, at least my own little personal meme. Here’s a short video about a technique first described by Ben Vollmer on the MS Dynamics CRM team blog.

Jan 12, 2010 — Dynamics CRM workflows can send e-mails, and there are plenty of business processes that can be enhanced by including workflow-generated e-mails. This article provides background information on Dynamics CRM e-mail integration, common scenarios for workflow/e-mail, and some tips and tricks.

Sept. 13 — Out of the box, you can include a link to a CRM record within the body of an email…but only if you send it manually. If you want a workflow to automatically send a record link, it takes a pinch of customization and a snippet of script, which I illustrate in this article.