For example, here’s what it looks like from an opportunity record:

Here’s what it looks like for an account record:

While your specific links will be different than mine (mine are for records contained in my CRM Online database, and the nasty-looking 25-character GUID uniquely identifies CRM records so it better be different!), the general structure will always be the same. I’ll come back to that point a little later, since it will solve a problem for us.

Problem: a Workflow-generated email cannot send a record link

So…while you can use the menu command I just mentioned to manually email a link to a record, you cannot email a link to a record from within a workflow. This might sound somewhat obscure, but it actually comes up a lot, and when you run into it, it just seems like something you should be able to do! Fortunately, there’s a relatively easy fix you can implement, with just a pinch of customization and a smidgeon of script. I’ll show you the solution next, but first, let me illustrate the problem in a little more detail.

Suppose I want a workflow to automatically send an email alert any time something important changes about an opportunity record. Here are a few scenarios to illustrate:

• If the pipeline stage of an opportunity record changes, send an email alerting the sales manager.
• If the current date is with three days of an open opportunity’s estimated close date, send a reminder email to the opportunity owner.
• If an opportunity is closed as “Lost”, send an email alert to the owner’s manager.

You can come up with as many scenarios as there are organizations in the world, but in all of them, it would be nice to include a simple clickable link in the body of the email, so the recipient of the alert can navigate directly to the record in question.

As you know if you’ve read my book on Dynamics CRM workflows, there are many things you can do with Dynamics CRM workflows…but unfortunately, this is not one of them! I’ll illustrate with a simple alert email, sent by a workflow that runs automatically any time specified values of the opportunity entity change.

The following screen shot shows the Set Properties form for the workflow’s Send e-mail action. For demo purposes, the email simply goes to me, and I’ve used Dynamic Values to populate the body of the email with presumably interesting information about the current opportunity.

There is an eponymously titled field you can insert for any entity in Dynamics CRM, in this case, using the “{field name{entity name}}” characteristic of the workflow design environment, it’s the {Opportunity{Opportunity}} you can see in the figure. The problem with that is that it’s only a clickable link to the record if it’s on the Regarding field…and the Regarding field only appears if you happen to be viewing the email activity within Dynamics CRM.

Here’s what an email sent by this workflow looks like in Dynamics CRM (e.g., as a History item associated with the opportunity record):

But if, like most people as you prefer consuming your email in Outlook or a non-CRM email client, you never see that Regarding field. For example, Outlook:

Solution: A Pinch of Customization and a Smidgeon of Script (and URL Addressable Forms)

If you’ve read this far, I’m grateful, and you may have noticed the “Link to record” field that’s appeared in a couple of screen shots. That’s the solution, and it uses a technique called URL Addressable Forms, which simply means that every form in Dynamics CRM can be accessed via a unique URL, consisting of an entity-specific prefix combined with a suffix unique to a specific record. You can use the Send Shortcut command I started out by discussing to see what the prefix is for some common record types:

Common Record Types

You can use a custom attribute for any entity you want to include a clickable link for by following these steps:

1. Customize the entity in question (e.g., Opportunity) by adding a new attribute. I added a custom attribute to the Opportunity entity, called it “Record Link” (it has a corresponding schema name), and gave it the following properties:

   

    

   The most important is to make it a Type of “nvarchar”, since that’s the only type that has the clickable link format of “URL”. Make sure it’s long enough. I made mine 200, but you can always come back and increase the maximum length (unlike the type and format values, which can’t be changed once the custom attribute is created.)

1. Once the attribute is created, the question is how to put the value into it. This really is just a smidgeon of script code – one line of Jscript you can put in the Opportunity form’s OnSave event:

    

   crmForm.all.img_recordlink.DataValue = ‘https://imginc.crm.dynamics.com/sfa/opps/edit.aspx?id=’+crmForm.ObjectId;
   

That’s pretty much it. If you implement this you’ll notice that since I wrote this code for the form’s save event, the new “Record Link” field won’t contain anything until a record’s form has been saved at least once after you’ve saved and published theses customizations. Too bad there’s not a built-in Record Link attribute for every Dynamics CRM entity. I guess I should add that to my top X list of new features that should be included in Dynamic CRM 5!

I wrote a book on Dynamics CRM workflows, by the way, and it contains tons of examples like this one and other useful workflows. You can purchase the book on Lulu.com or on Amazon, and if you do, you can also get a (free) subscription to the online version of the book, where you can download the workflows themselves, customizations, and related content.

Here’s a link you can visit to find out more about my book and purchase it:

A Review of Internet Lead Capture for Dynamics CRM

This problem now has some good solutions, and one that I particularly like — Web2CRM from CRM Innovation at http://www.crminnovation.com — is the starting point for this article.

To quickly review, what Web2CRM lets you do is create an Internet page with a form on it, into which a visitor can enter information, and from which you can pop the information directly into your CRM. One big advantage of the Web2CRM product, compared to (for example) the Microsoft implementation in CRM Online, is that Web2CRM lets you create a web form for ANY entity in your Dynamics CRM, including custom ones! So while the CRM Online approach only lets you accept Internet Leads into the new “Internet Lead” entity, Web2CRM gives you a sweet drag and drop form designer you can use to create a web form to populate any entity.

For example, here’s a look at the Web2CRM form design environment. In the next figure, I’ve already selected the entity I’m designing a form for, and I’ve got a nice drag and drop environment I can use to select any of its fields to place on the form. You get a nice design-ish view of your CRM form on the left hand side, from which you can drag and drop fields onto the Web2CRM form-in-progress in the middle. At the right, you can see which entity the form’s being designed for, and you get some other form-level settings I won’t go into here.

If you click the Publish button you get a very generic form that is hosted on the CRM Innovation servers — another example of the hosted “software+services” model. But if you click the cryptically named “Carry Code” button you open up a window with a bunch of script code you can simply copy and pasted onto one of your very own pages, and create a page on your site that looks like this one (or however you want yours to look!):

To review, the form is created for the “Info Requester” custom entity I created in my CRM organiztion. So if you fill out the form you will find here —  www.DynamicsCRMTrickBag.com/request-content — a new record gets created in my CRM with the information you provide.

So…on to the main point of this article…

What to do with those Internet Leads?

One good thing to do is to send an acknowledgment email — often referred to as an “auto-responder”. In Dynamics CRM, one of the seven actions a workflow can take (can you name the other six?) is to send an email, so I can create a workflow to run automatically when a new Info Requester record is created and send a nice auto-responder. But…you can’t email directly to a custom entity (yet!) in CRM 4, so the first thing my workflow has to do is create a Lead record based on the Info Request record. So here’s what my simple workflow looks like:

The “Create Lead” action simply takes the fields entered onto the web form, and pops them into the corresponding fields on a new lead record.

You can use dynamic values to configure the “Send e-mail” action, crafting a somewhat customized and oh-so-responsive response! Like this:

And last but not least, notice the Attachments tab in that figure. You can attach one or more items to a workflow-generated email in Dynamics CRM 4, so depending on what kind of information people might be interested in receiving — a white paper, say, or even a Dynamics CRM workflow all zipped up and ready to go — you can include that in the response as well.

If you want to see how it works, feel free to fill out this form, and I’ll get immediately back to you with a responsive auto-responder, attached workflow and all!

Richard

Answer: You can definitely do this, but as usual, there are at least a couple of options. First, start by creating an automatic workflow on the Create trigger for the Opportunity entity. Make the first action a Check Condition, and note that for the Opportunity entity, there’s a very handy related entity called ‘Originating Lead’ — this is exactly what you want for the scenario you described, since it will let you check to see whether the Opportunity just created was created by using the Convert action from a Lead record, or ‘from scratch’ (with no originating Lead record).

So what I would do is create that conditional logic, and only if the Originating Lead record’s Topic contains data (Topic is required for Lead, so this will always work), then fill in the fields on Opportunity from their values on the Lead record, which will be accessible from the workflow.

One caveat: I’d advise against creating custom attributes in the Opportunity entity to hold these values, since they already exist elsewhere in your CRM (on the Contact or Account records), and it could be confusing to users since they won’t be in synch if changes are made in one place or the other. What I would do is use the Opportunity record’s ‘Description’ field, and put some text in there describing what information you’re showing them, and then include the fields from the Lead record using Dynamic Values in the workflow UI.

In my opinion, however, the most exciting role for Dynamics CRM is as a “customization platform”. Recently we’ve started to see people referring to it as “XRM”, with the “X” indicating its adaptibility to any line of business application area. Essentially, if you need to build a database application and use the Internet as your delivery platform, you should consider Dynamics CRM as your app foundation.

I’m excited about the next release; I think Microsoft is really going to push this XRM concept, and make the platform both easier and more powerfully extensible. But in the meantime, we’ve got the 4.0 release, and if you are new to customizing CRM, or if you need to pass the Dynamics CRM 4.0 Customization and Configuration exam (30-631), here are a couple sample videos I’ve recorded on the topics:

• Core customization topics. Watch this video for Dynamics CRM 4.0 core customization concepts. This is a good 30-minute (or so) overview of the various ways you can customize Dynamics CRM: form and view customizations, entity and attribute customizations, entity relationships and mappings, workflows, .NET extensions.
• Here’s a detailed (and longer!) video that covers configuration topics (business units, users, security roles). Even though they aren’t really customization topics, per se, you really do need to understand them to be an effective customizer of Dynamics CRM. The first 10 minutes covers program-related information, so you can skip that if you want to go directly to the meat of the content!
• Read this article on Status and Status Reason values on the MS Dynamics CRM Resource Center, and then save it to your Favorites for a reference. Having this link handy has saved me lots of time over the years, and if you need to customize CRM, you’ll find it useful too!

And finally, if you really DO want to take the exam, click this link for a walk-through of a 631 practice test, with commentary (from me). These practice tests were posted on Microsoft.com/learning for a while, but I think they took them down — at least I can’t find them. (If you ever find them, please let me know where they are! )

And even more finally, here’s the practice test I wrote for the CRM 4.0 customization & configuration exam. Enjoy!

I hope you found this useful; and if you do take the exam, good luck!

Richard

Here’s a recording I made on self-referential relationships in Dynamics CRM 4.0. This is a good example of how to use the relationship feature to get the “cloning” function I just mentioned: