Watch out: the Citizen Developers are coming! They are armed with easy to approach GUI tools like Flow, PowerApps and PowerBI, and they aren’t afraid to connect to any of the 160+ cloud apps that you may or may not know your organization is using to solve everyday business problems that the traditional IT projects […]
Tracking Pipeline Development Over Time in CRM 2015
We’ve come to part 3/3 in the Smarter Sales Process article trilogy. In the earlier posts we talked about customizing the lead qualification process and using calculated fields for opportunity estimated revenue, to get more out of Dynamics CRM 2015 than what the standard sales related functionality offers. To close things off, let’s have a look […]
Customizing Lead Qualification Process in CRM 2015
This is the first part in an article series where I’ll be presenting a few customization tips & tricks that you can use in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 to enhance the functionality used in a typical sales process. The content was first shown in my live webcast on MSDynamicsWorld.com on May 6th: “A Non-Developer’s Guide to […]
Monitoring Rollup Field Values with Workflows
In an earlier post I demonstrated how you could leverage the new Rollup Fields feature of Dynamics CRM 2015 to summarize the behavior of your customers and produce interesting metrics that could be used for targeting your sales activities towards the most active individuals who have reacted to your email and website content. The example […]
CRM 2015 Rollup Fields: The Gotchas
In an earlier blog post in December, I described one use case for the new Rollup Fields feature introduced in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015. This example involved rolling up data from email events tracked via ClickDimensions and summarizing this on the contact’s form, so you’ll want to check out the steps listed there if you […]
Time Travel with Workflows: Accessing “Before” and “After” Values
Dynamics CRM has had a built-in auditing feature since the 2011 version, which provides a really handy tool for situations where someone needs to investigate the changes that have taken place on field values of a specific record. By default auditing is not enabled, but I recommend you to seriously consider enabling it for all […]
Dynamics CRM Reminder Workflows Done Right
A very frequent requirement that customers present for their CRM system functionality is that they will get automatic reminders from it when an item recorded into the database requires their attention after a specific date is reached. This might be a hard, physical date like a contract expiring or a softer variable such as a […]
Making Better Use of Business Process Flow Data
CRM 2013 Business Process Flows (BPF) have been designed to support a scenario where the same transactional records (opportunities, cases, custom entities like projects) can follow alternative process steps depending on the business logic required. For example, you can use the same opportunity entity to support the sales processes of two departments that are operating […]
Auto-Numbering with CRM Workflows: Real-Time vs. Asynchronous
One of the missing features that is often requested for Dynamics CRM is the ability to automatically assign numeric identifiers to records (see the feature suggestion on MS Connect). Sure, we’ve had the Auto-Numering feature for a limited set of default entities (contracts, cases, articles, quotes, orders, invoices, campaigns) since the early days of CRM […]
Address Copy Button with CRM 2013 Business Rules and Workflows
The default forms in Dynamics CRM only contain one set of address fields, but most organizations will need to surface at least the Address 2 fields for accounts and contacts to manage the different information for visiting address, mailing address, delivery address, invoicing address or whatever the business scenario. Sometimes it may be justified to […]
