BusinessNone

Creating a Summary with Microsoft CRM Workflow

benvollmer — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:47:11 GMT

The workflow engine in Microsoft Dynamics CRM is an area I personally spend a ton of time playing with. It is like Jscript was in Version 1.x and 3.0 for me. It has A TON of potential that many people have barely scratched the surface of.

So in working with a customer over the past month, they wanted to track the number of widgets each one of their accounts have at each location. Which works awesome, until they want to be able to run some queries, and there is no way to be able to get the total number of widgets per account. How many accounts have brand A of widgets in a quantity of over 200? How many have Brand B?

So that is where workflow comes in. In talking with Jon Goodwin from Microsoft Consulting Services, he showed me a quick and easy way to have workflow create a summary number on a parent entity. So he showed me a quick trick to be able to take quantities from a child entity and using workflow, create a summary of the number of widgets owned.

Step 1. Create Widget Entity. Add a Quantity Owned to Widget Entity. In addition, I also wanted to track by competitor, but that step isn’t used in this example. Then create a field to track number of widgets and type of widget.

Step 2: Create N:1 Relationship Between Widget and Account Entities. (So the Widgets are a Child Record of an Account)

Step 3: Create Summary Field on Account. (To hold how many widgets total you have!)

Step 3: Create Workflow on Widget Entity. You will want the workflow to fire on the create of a Widget as well as the change of the number of widgets.

Add An Step with the type of Update Record. Select Account as the Entity to update.

If you are anything like me, you generally close the form assistant. But in this case, we want to leave the form assistant open. We should click on the Total Number of Widgets, Make the Operator Increment By, and Look for Widget and Number of Widgets. In the Default Value, we put a 0 so that if the user creates the entity and doesn’t fill it in, it doesn’t inflate the total count.

Save and Close the Workflow and Publish it.

So here is the finished product:

And if I browse to Widgets, you can see that we do in fact have 1011 widgets in this location for this customer.

So there is one more way that Workflow can make CRM work better for your customers. Attached is the workflow rule if you want to play with in your demo or testing environment.

Happy Workflowing!

Partner ISV Event: Web Services in Scribe

benvollmer — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 20:14:04 GMT

One of the biggest missing links to me in Scribe was it’s ability to connect to a full Web Service back end service. Well, with the release of Scribe 6.5, they have the ability do this. For partners ONLY this even is a little later this week and is one I would not miss.

Webcast: Scribe 6.5 Product Launch – Thursday, April 16 @ 11am – 12pm EST
Insight 6.5 is a major release which includes an extensive list of features that have been requested by Scribe partners and customers. The new release also includes significant new functionality targeted at enterprise accounts. These are:

- Failover/Disaster Recovery

- Web Services Adapter

- Support for 64-bit Windows Server 2008

Scribe Presenters for the webcast will be:

Bob Sturim - Vice President, Products
John Gravely - Vice President, Marketing and Product Marketing
Lou Antonucci - Director, Sales

Please register at the following registration URL https://www.livemeeting.com/lrs/8001615779/Registration.aspx?pageName=8nlw1x85309wfbns

Process Diagrams for Demos – Finding Weebles

benvollmer — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:38:55 GMT

Since I changed jobs last year, I was still able to do some Demo2Win Training classes, which if you haven’t attend yet, you really should. One of my favorite parts of the Demo2Win methodology is the creatign of a repeatable process so your customer see exactly where you are going. (And goes there with you!)

The idea of creating movie scenes in demos is now a huge part of my demos. I won’t demo with out incorporating some business process flows into the demo. We just did a demo last week, where use used the process slides to break up an ungodly number of slides to keep the customer’s interest and make sure our ideas where presented in a concrete manner.

We have also used this method when we where given an RFP and asked to present our solution according to the RFP. We slightly re-arranged the RFP materials and presented them visually to the customer and as a result, we where able to better position ourselves than the competition who tried to follow the script 100%.

These also make killer hand out to leave with your customers to show them what your solution actually does for them.

In creating the process slides, we want to emulate the icons in CRM around people. And to me they look like Weebles. (yes, I used to play with Weebles as a kid…)

Finding those icons has been a complete pain in the neck for me. Until, I was searching the Microsoft Clip Art Gallery for something totally unrelated… And low and behold, if you search for “Avatar”, you will come up with some awesome looking “Weebles” to enhance your presentation.

One of my first attempts…. With the new Weebles, they got alot more colorful and meaningful. :)

Here is a brief sample of the Avatars from the Clip Art Gallery:

I have moved on…

benvollmer — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 18:34:00 GMT

It has been 3 and a half years since I started blogging here on MSDN. It has been a fun ride, and one that I will never forget. This blog went from last place to the Top 100 of all blogs on MSDN. (Second only to the CRM Team’s blog.) I did however, make some major mistakes early on. Key amongst them are the URL for the blog. In July of 2008, I changed jobs, got an AWESOME new manager and job. (As well as a new house, etc…) With that being said, I screwed up the branding early on. :) And now seems like an awesome time to fix that.

So I have changed blog providers. Instead of being here on MSDN, I have moved to www.businessnone.com for the blog. http://feeds.feedburner.com/BusinessNone is the new address for the RSS feed. Please update your RSS readers and Favorites.

Chris Kahl who assumed my old role in the Mid Atlantic Area has graciously agreed to continue to maintain this blog. Please feel free to stop by and harass him.

So for those of you still asking questions, yes I am still employed by Microsoft and no I am not doing this right before I leave. (At least that I know of…) The website name Business None came from a friend of mine. When I was working at my last company before Microsoft, we sublet some office space from a development / infrastructure shop in Columbia, MD. They picked up SAP’s BusinessOne about 3 months into my renting an office. The consulting staff hated BusinessOne. They started calling it BusinessNone. And I saw the domain was available and grabbed it. It has been hosting graphics for this blog since it’s inception.

Look forward to seeing you on www.businessnone.com and please excuse the mess as I migrate stuff over there.

Scribe Advance Training Class

benvollmer — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 17:41:00 GMT

I am very tardy in publishing this. :) Last month I was invited by the fine folks over at Scribe Software to attend their Level 2 Scribe Insight Training program. I have been using Scribe since dirt was formed, but since joining Microsoft 4 years have not used to it for anything other than demo’s and the occasional piece of troubleshooting I get ramped into.

All I can say, is WOW. Scribe has made some HUGE improvements in the software in the past 4 years. If you haven’t looked at Scribe in a while, I would urge you to do so again. If you do use Scribe, this class is for you. It is all of the stuff not in the manual and a TON of tips and tricks on how to get the most out of Scribe.

The class is being offered all across the US, so I would sign up for it if you are interested. They keep them pretty small. Below the photo of the day is a brief description of the class. The next two coming up are at the end of the month in New York City and Boston.

(J.R.- Interdyn-CFO Consulting /Mark & Ben – IBIS / Glenn- LBMC /Guillermo – eParnters)

This course is designed for technical consultants who implement integrations using Scribe Insight. Through instructor lead discussion and hands-on labs, the students will learn the best practices for building one-way and two-way integrations. Microsoft Dynamics CRM is used as the use-case for hands-on labs and some course materials will center around specific integration methodologies with Dynamics CRM. Students completing this course will have a thorough understanding of the integration design patterns and features Scribe uses when building its own integration templates with Scribe Insight. This is a full two day course.

The course is designed for students that have completed Scribe’s certification training and familiarity with the Scribe Adapter for Microsoft Dynamics is highly recommended. Prior field experience implementing integrations with Scribe Insight will be helpful in understanding the concepts in this course.

Round Robin Lead Assignment using Workflow

benvollmer — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 23:14:51 GMT

Some of my customers over the years have used a Round Robin way. So the first lead that comes in goes to Sales Rep A, second lead goes to Sales Rep B, etc. It works well with smaller sales teams that occupy the same geographic territory. I haven’t encountered one of these customers in quite some time. Fast forward 6-8 or more years, and I got a call from Paul. Paul asked me about the easiest way to assign leads as they come in to sales reps in a Round Robin mechanism.

Back in my early days of consulting, I used to use a product that had a feature called lookup.ini. It was an awesome little utility. One of the hand uses for it was doing round robin lead assignment. My initial thought was to use the lookup.ini… But wrong product for that. So with Microsoft CRM’s powerful workflow engine, we created a very simple engine to assign leads to reps one at a time.

The basics of this are pretty easy. This sample is for inspiration and I would make sure you modified it before you put it in your production servers. :)

1. Create A Lead Round Robin Entity. On that entity, create an integer with the name of Lead Assignment. Make the entity visible in the settings area of CRM. Make a 1:N Relationship with Leads. Don’t make the link visible so you don’t have a bunch of things hanging off the left Navigation area. :)

2. – Create The “Main Workflow”

In the main workflow, you want to update the lead to relate the Lead Round Robin to the Lead. And then you want to do a number of If Statements. If Lead Round Robin = 2, then apply Workflow #2. Do that for each of your sales reps. (So in my example, we have 5 sales reps, so all of the workflows will be identical for each of the reps minus the 5th one.)

All of the IF statements will end up firing off workflows that we will create. All of the workflows are identical, minus the last one. The last one will in turn reset the counter back to 1 and start the process over again.

This sample will work with CRM Online or CRM on Premise.

You can download the sample here.

Enjoy!

Inline Grids for Sales Orders in Microsoft Dynamics CRM

benvollmer — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:39:00 GMT

In every CRM application I have ever played with there have been areas I have never been proud to show off to customers or prospects. And adding products to CRM's Sales Orders has been one of those areas for me in CRM since the products inception.

While it works well in high dollar low transaction environments, it doesn't work so well in high transaction, low dollar transactions. One of my most recent demos was to a company that did over 50,000 sales orders a day and so working with Daren from Microsoft Consulting Services, he build a REALLY cool too to help them VERY quickly insert items into Microsoft CRM without the normal number of clicks.

The coolest thing to me is that this is 100% HTML and JScript. No C# or VB.NET here at all. (If you look at the code, Daren built a Service that allows him to call CRM's web services easily from JScript. Check out his blog for more details.)

In the left grid, we enter new products and in the right grid we have a list of all of the products that they have ordered for the past three completed sales orders.

So below you can see a screen shot of what the grid looks like installed.

Once you have inserted all of your products, you can quickly click the recalculate button to be able to have all of the totals created as well as have the items inserted into the Sales Order.

Here are all of the files to make this magic happen. You will need to copy the contents of the custom.zip file to your CRM Demo Server and drop it off in a directory called custom. The order customizations will need to be applied to your CRM server as well.

This is DEMO WARE. Happy Demos! And Thanks Daren! This rocks!

Dynamic Picklist - Sub Industry based on Industry aka Cascading Picklists in Microsoft CRM

benvollmer — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 14:52:00 GMT

This contains sample code that demonstrates how to implement dynamic picklists on a custom entity. It creates a custom entity named “Dynamic Picklist Test” that contains Industry and Sub-Industry picklist fields. When a value for Industry is selected, the values in the Sub-Industry picklist field are filtered. If there are no sub-industries for an industry, the Sub-Industry field is disabled.

See how the Sub-Industry Field isn't even an option. :-)

The sample files are not intended to be used in a production environment without prior testing. You should deploy this sample to a test environment and examine it for interaction or interference with other parts of the system.

Click here for the download. And READ the ReadMe.doc file!!!

Convergence 2006

benvollmer — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 14:42:54 GMT

We’re excited for our 10th annual Convergence event! Convergence 2006 will take place in Dallas, Texas, USA, Saturday, March 25th through Tuesday, March 28th, 2006.

Convergence provides an exceptional agenda of various speakers, detailed product demonstrations, and in-depth learning sessions. At the event, you can discuss solutions, address business needs, and establish and grow a true community that can be leveraged throughout the year.

Ultimately, Convergence helps you build skills and knowledge that enhance your solution knowledge and business productivity. Recognizing that experience is the best teacher, we have designed many of our workshops to feature presentations that tackle real-world issues and present practical solutions.

Convergence is geared towards our end users and having seen the tenative tracks, looks to be AWESOME for our CRM Customers!

More details at: http://www.microsoft.com/BusinessSolutions/convergence.mspx

CRM 3.0 SDK - Release Version

benvollmer — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 14:33:00 GMT

The GA release of the Microsoft CRM 3.0 SDK is now available for download here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=9c178b68-3a06-4898-bc83-bd14b74308c5&displaylang=en

The live version has been submitted to MSDN and will be working its way through their processes over the next few weeks.