June 25, 2011 – Installment #3 from my upcoming book on business processes in CRM 2011. This one covers a couple of foundation topics: working with actions and conditions. Enjoy!

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!

Unlike “A Tale of Two Cities”, my upcoming book, “Building Business Processes in Dynamics CRM 2011″, will be serialized on the author’s blog rather than his literary journal. Plus it won’t take 31 weeks. Here’s Installment 1, on Introducing Dialog Processes.

May 1, 2011 – Even though workflows haven’t changed a lot in Dynamics CRM 2011 compared to the previous version, they’re more useful than ever. A big reason is that there are a lot more record types to work with. In this article I review Connection Roles and Connections, and show how you can use a workflow to automate customer referral tracking.

March 27, 2011 – Dialog processes give you an important new way to create flexible, interactive business processes in Dynamics CRM 2011. In this article I provide a quick review of the new functionality they support and contrast them with the traditional workflow process, which are still available and function much the same as they did in the previous version. After reviewing the basics, I cover something that might seem a little confusing at first, but that turns out to be important: how you can create queries of Dynamics CRM data within your dialogs, and how you can make one query dynamically dependent on the results of a previous one.

November 11, 2010 – I recently had the pleasure of presenting two sessions at the Extreme 2010 conference in Las Vegas. John Verdon, Bryan Tuttle & the rest of the organizers & crew did an awesome job and put on a great show. Here’s a condensed version of one of my sessions: What’s New in CRM 2011 Workflows.

Sept. 27, 2010 – Here’s the brief overview of the new workflows features, from my What’s New in CRM 2011 session 1. More details coming soon, in this presentation I focused on what for me is the most obvious new feature, the addition of a (synchronous) user experience, in the form of the “Dialog” category of workflows — er, processes! If you’re wondering what to do with Pages, Prompts and Responses…start here!

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?