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.

Sometimes What’s NOT there is What’s Important!
In Dynamics CRM it’s possible to delete Opportunity and Case records. (This might sound trivially obvious, but in fact there are many kinds of records that cannot be deleted, such as User, Business Unit, and others.) Even though a well-designed implementation will use security roles to guard against the [...]

I’ve written a few times about integrating Internet marketing into your overall Dynamics CRM marketing efforts. In particular, one of the big gaps in the traditional feature set was the lack of a web-to-lead function so real “marketing types” could capture leads from a web form directly into Dynamics CRM…without having to write code to [...]

 In a recent article on the Dynamics CRM Team Blog, Ben Vollmer outlined an approach for assigning Leads on a “round-robin” basis, first one to rep a, second to rep b, etc. I’d been asked about this a few times so I was glad to see Ben’s excellent solution. When I tried to implement it, however, I found it a [...]

If you’re a frequent reader of the Trick Bag you may have noticed a recent spate of articles about Dynamics CRM workflows. Most of these and many more to come are examples taken from a book I published on www.Lulu.com (If you aren’t familiar with lulu, it’s a “self-publishing” site where you can publish pretty much [...]

Assigning Records Using Queues? Everybody knows you can’t do that!

As all well educated CRMers know, only a limited number of record types in Dynamics CRM (Cases and Activity records, to be precise) can be assigned to a Queue. When a user “accepts” a record from a queue, the record is assigned to that user. [...]

I know — not a very sexy title, but this can be a confusing issue, and it has plenty of applications if you need to create automatic workflows in CRM. The basic issue is this: if you have an automatic workflow that should only run for SOME users but not all users, how do you do that? [...]

Processes are to workflows what quarterbacks are to football: they get all the glory. And in Dynamics CRM, it’s often entities like Opportunities and Cases that will have complex multi-stage business processes implemented as a workflow.
 
But workflows can provide yeomanlike, behind the scenes functionality as well, such as bulk data updates where you need to [...]

I’ve been asked about this a few times and hadn’t yet found out how to do it. My strategy was to keep looking until I found a good solution, and it finally paid off. In Ben Vollmer’s blog post, he explains a sweet trick that will let you do this, with a custom “counter” entity you increment [...]