Tag: Business Process Flow

Playbooks for Dynamics 365 Activity Templates

In my previous post I explored the current Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement solution update practices and used the Playbooks feature as an example. Here’s a quick overview of what the actual Playbooks offer.

The official MS documentation, “enforce best practices with playbooks”, gives you a list of what the initial October ’18 release of Playbooks contains. The feature is essentially a way for a sales manager to determine a set of activities that sales users should perform when a real life event takes place that the playbook contents has been designed for. A checklist, if you will.

To get started, you’ll need to have the Sales app upgraded to a recent enough version, so that the Sales Hub UCI app displays Playbook Templates under the App Settings:

Notice that you won’t find these anywhere in the legacy web client (“classic UI”). One thing you might want to do first via that legacy client, though, is to ensure that the associated roles for Playbook Manager and Playbook User are assigned to the required user accounts.

To kick things off, you could create examples of Playbook Categories for grouping your playbooks, since that’s a compulsory lookup on the Playbook Template form. The actual configuration work will all take place on the template, where you’ll first of all specify the record types that the playbook applies for. Right now it’s only lead, opportunity, quote, order, invoice, so don’t plan on using playbooks for any custom entities or other Dynamics 365 Apps than Sales.

The template shows a subgrid of Playbook Activities, which look pretty much like your regular activities on the surface. They are a separate entity, however, as this is how you define the parameters for an activity (task, phone call or appointment). You have the usual subject, description, duration etc. fields you’d find on a normal activity, but instead of fixed dates you give them relative due dates, calculated from when the playbook is launched.
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November 6, 2018
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 Smarter Sales Processes in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015.” As promised during the webcast, I’ll be releasing all the slides here on my blog, but since there was a lot of details to go through in the 1h session, it will be split into three separate articles, to improve the accessibility to this information for those who didn’t attend the live webcast.

The overarching theme of this series is to show you how the creative combination of the various customization tools available in Dynamics CRM 2015 can be used for building whole new functionality into the application – without having to write any custom code. The emphasis is on the word combination, since very often you’ll need to use several different pieces of the platform’s customization tools to achieve the end result. This isn’t something that you can easily learn just by reading the official product documentation that typically focuses on the introduction of a single feature at a time. With the examples in this article series I hope to demonstrate what these combinations could look like, in the context of customizing the standard application behavior in the sales process.

The techniques are by no means exclusive to the sales area of Dynamics CRM. Any process that you manage with our CRM/XRM application can surely benefit from the type of custom functionality that you can build via Business Process Flows, Real-time Workflows, Business Rules, Calculated Fields and Rollup Fields. The absolutely best way to gain an understanding of what you can achieve with the point & click customization tools in Dynamics CRM is to experiment with the tools in a sandbox environment, so I encourage you to go and try out these scenarios in an actual working CRM system. (Why not spin up a new CRM Online trial org and also get access to all the new CRM Online 2015 Update 1 goodies while at it?)

What’s Wrong with CRM 2015 Lead Qualification?

Those of you that have been working with Dynamics CRM for more than just a couple of years will probably remember how the things used to work before CRM 2013. When clicking on the Qualify button on a lead record, the user was presented with a dialog that allowed them to choose whether a new account, contact and opportunity record should be created from this lead. In the new world of Business Process Flows and no-popup UI of CRM 2013 (and CRM 2015), such options are no longer presented to the user. While this makes for a smooth user experience in general, it creates severe conflicts with many real life business processes of companies who either A) don’t use opportunities or B) don’t want to directly convert each lead into an opportunity. There are lots of suggestions on MS Connect (registration required, see here) to restore the ability for users to select not to create an opportunity from a qualified lead, but so far we haven’t seen any changes in the product to accommodate this.

So, if CRM wants to create opportunities but the user doesn’t, what could a mere system customizer do, without any knowledge of how to write plugins or scripts to develop new functionality by using the CRM SDK? Well, I’ve come up with a reasonably good workaround that uses the following solution components to establish a true user driven lead qualification process:
- Branching Business Process Flow (BPF) to show stages that don’t take the user to the opportunity entity
- Real-time Workflow to hand the lead status change and record creation instead of the built-in, non-configurable business logic of Dynamics CRM
- Business Rules to conditionally show/hide fields for account/contact details on the form
- Quick View Forms to present the records created from lead qualification process on the lead form after it’s closed
You can find the detailed description of how I’ve configured each components from the below presentation:

(For those of you who are not reading this article directly on survivingcrm.com and can’t see the embedded SlideShare presentation, click this link to access it.)

I hope that this example has given you some ideas on how the lead management process and related Dynamics CRM functionality could be further developed in your own CRM organization. Stay tuned for part two of this Smarter Sales Process series, where we’ll be moving to the opportunity record and exploring how the estimated revenue information can more easily be managed by using the Calculated Fields feature introduced in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 release. If you simply can’t wait for it or want to see the lead qualification process in action, then the webcast recording is available on YouTube already today.
May 10, 2015
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 in very different markets and thus have different process stages as well as information content gathered within those stages.

You can either limit the availability of BPF’s by CRM security role, so that a salesman in department A will always get the sales process A for the opportunity records he creates, or you can enable the users to see a number of different processes and let them choose the correct one via the Switch Process button on the Command Bar. In the latter scenario the Select Business Process Flow dialog window will present the available processes, like this:

More processes will naturally mean more variety in the type of data your opportunity records will hold. Instead of a fixed number of stages in a specific order you’ll have opportunities that are following different sales processes with unique stages, which could easily lead to a situation where the CRM user may be comparing apples and oranges in the same entity view. How can we avoid such confusion in a multi-process environment? Hopefully this post will give you some ideas on the best strategy to manage your Business Process Flow data.

Working with the Stage Category

The officially recommended tool for making Business Process Flow stages visible in views and charts is the Stage Category option set. This is a field available on the Process Stage entity and you can select a value for it while editing the Business Process Flow process record.

Basically what this field allows you to do is to standardize the stage values across different BPF processes. You can enter a different name for the actual stage in the BPF editor but still link it to a Stage Category value that is used in some of your other processes, too. Depending on your business, there may be different sales processes that would each contain a conceptual Propose stage but apply different terminology for it. That’s one problem that the Stage Category can solve.

If you want to customize the list of values available for the Stage Category, just find the global option set under the Default Solution (Settings – Customizations – Customize the System) and update it like any other field. The new values will appear in he Business Process Flow editor after publishing the changes.

When building a view to display the opportunities by stage, you’ll need to add a column from the related Process Stage entity to leverage this information. In the Add Columns dialog of Advanced Find, choose the aforementioned entity and select the Stage Category field from the list that appears.

One limitation related to the view columns is that we can’t apply any sorting to the Process Stage field. That’s because it’s from a related entity and as a result it doesn’t appear as a possible field in the Configure Sort Order dialog. This means that our opportunity view can’t have the records nicely aligned per stage value, to simulate a pipeline, but instead we’ll need to rank them based on some field that’s directly available on the opportunity record itself.

Grouping or Filtering by Business Process Flow

So, we have the capability to merge stage values across different BPF’s into a single view. Pretty cool. Now, since different sales processes are often related to different types of product categories or business lines, what are the steps needed for creating an opportunity view that also displays the name of the BPF process chosen for the record? For example, if we want to group the revenue per process instead of process stage, which field do we need to add into the view?

Sorry, there is no such field. Thank you, have a nice day.

Excuse me, what?! Didn’t you just show how to harmonize the stage values across different processes? Surely there’s a way to un-harmonize things and break it down based on individual processes and stages?

Well, stages yes, but processes, no. You see, there isn’t a direct relationship to the actual Business Process Flow process entity from the opportunity entity (or any other BPF enabled entity). While the system does store a GUID reference to the process and process stage records in the StageId and ProcessId fields, these are “unique identifier” type of fields that you can’t reference in Advanced Find query criteria. We could add them as a view column, but they’d just be gibberish like “3e8ebee6-a2bc-4451-9c5f-b146b085413a”.

The Process Stage entity that we examined earlier is a parent entity of the opportunity and it can be accessed in Advanced Find, but it doesn’t contain any field that would specify the name of the process to which the stage belongs to. When selecting view columns in Advanced Find we can only go one level up, but luckily when building a filter criteria for the view we can query entities further away. This means we can reach the Process entity related to the Process Stage entity and find our Alternative Sales Process from there, as illustrated below. (Note that you’ll need to change the default lookup view to display the BPF processes, as otherwise you’ll only see workflow processes to choose from.)

By adding this criteria we are able to build a view containing only opportunities from a specific Business Process Flow. To see the total pipeline revenue per each process we’d just need to switch between the views, or build a dashboard that contains one list/chart per process. Not quite as elegant as having a single chart grouping the revenue per process, but it’s still better than a mixed bucket of opportunities from all over the place.

What if I told you there was a better way to do this than the out-of-the-box data model provides? Would you be interested in seeing its possibilities? Then you’re in luck, because that’s what I was going to write about next. (more…)

February 1, 2014
Enforcing Business Process Flow Fields with Real-time Workflows

Earlier I demonstrated the new capabilities that Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 has introduced for workflow processes: showing error messages with real-time workflows. I covered examples of record assignment, merging duplicate accounts and stopping unwanted updates in the Mobile Express client. This time I’ll take a look at how the error message feature can be leveraged in managing the sales process on opportunity records.

The new Business Process Flows in CRM 2013 provide the possibility of setting fields in a stage as required. This is a nice advancement over the previous platform functionality that only allowed you to set fields as business required per entity, since now we can dynamically control the stage at which we will require the user to input the information onto a form. It’s very typical that a user wouldn’t yet have much details available about a sales opportunity when first entering the information into the CRM system, so it makes total sense to not ask too many questions initially. After all, you can make a field required, but if the user simply doesn’t possess the information asked in it, he or she may just enter dummy data into the field to meet the technical minimum requirements.

Looking at the default opportunity sales process that comes with Dynamics CRM, we have a number of bit fields in the Close stage that indicate tasks the opportunity owner should complete before closing the opportunity. In the Business Process Flow editor we can tick a box and set these fields to be required. What does a required field in the Business Process Flow then mean exactly? It simply means that you can’t move the record forward from that stage until a value is entered in the field. In the case of bit fields (two options) the value should be set to Yes (ID 1) to meet the criteria.

OK, sounds logical, but what about if we’re already in the last stage of the process? How is the requirement level enforced if there are no more stages to move to? The answer is: it’s not. Since the actual closure of an opportunity as Won or Lost is not a stage in the process but rather a change of the record status, Business Process Flow has nothing to do with it. We can observe this behavior by setting a field required in a process stage and then navigating to a test opportunity and attempting to close it as Won. In our example, the File Debrief field has been set as required in the Opportunity Sales Process, but the system still allows the user to close the opportunity without entering data into this field.

“That sounds like an unfortunate gap in the business logic, I guess we’ll need to get a developer to write a plug-in for us to stop the status change operation if required data is missing.” Hold it right there, mister! We’re dealing with Dynamics CRM 2013 here, which means we can build the equivalent feature with a real-time workflow process! No custom code needed for such a simple task, as long as you know how to leverage the new interactive nature of synchronous workflows.

Let’s create a new workflow on the opportunity record and set it to start when the record status changes. We’ll configure it to be run as “after” the event, since we’re interested in capturing the new status value of the record. In the workflow criteria we’ll define that we want our business logic to apply if the opportunity is being set as Won but the File Debrief field has not bee set to Completed. Since this is a real-time workflow, we can add a step where we set the process to be stopped as Cancelled and then define an error message in that step’s properties. This will then be presented to the end user who is triggering the status change event if the workflow criteria is met.

Now, let’s go to our test opportunity, re-open it and attempt to close it without marking the File Debrief field as Completed. When clicking the Close as Won button on the opportunity form command bar we’re presented with the standard, non-customizable Close Opportunity dialog window asking us about the Actual Revenue, Close Date and so on. Since we’re so excited about having won the opportunity we’ve completely forgotten that there were still tasks we needed to complete before we’re allowed to close it off from the sales pipeline.

Once we click OK, a new dialog window is presented: the Business Process Error prompt, along with the error message that we defined in the Stop stage of our workflow process. The opportunity close event is rolled back and we can return to the opportunity form to see what steps of the process we had neglected.

As I mentioned in my previous article about the new business process automation capabilities of CRM 2013, Business Process Flows are essentially a process map that is meant to guide the user through the stages. It cannot actually perform any automated tasks by itself, nor enforce any rules apart from the changing of the stage through the visual business process control at the top of the form. To implement this type of functionality you should look into Business Rules and Real-Time Workflows instead.

November 9, 2013
Getting Your Head Around Dynamics CRM 2013 Processes – Part 2
In the first part of this series we looked at the two new process categories introduced in Dynamics CRM 2013: Business Process Flows and Actions. Now it’s time to dig deeper into new CRM 2013 functionality that will allow you to achieve process automation results in areas where custom code was previously required.

Business Rules: Processes In Disguise

You may have already heard about the new feature in CRM 2013 that promises to free us from writing Javascript to manipulate form fields, called Business Rules. If you’re looking to find them from under the Process Center, though, you’re in the wrong place. Business Rules are a property of the entity and you’ll see them alongside other such components like Charts and Views in the Solution explorer. From this we can already gather that it won’t be possible to move Business Rules across different CRM organizations as individual components like you can do with processes, instead they always travel with their parent entity in the solution files.

Business Rules have the nickname of Portable Business Logic (PBL), so there must be something else that makes them particularly easy to carry around then? The portability actually refers to the way in which the rules can be applied to all the different forms of the entity and also to how they will be carried over to the mobile client application (MoCA) on Windows 8 and iOS tablets. They are however form specific in the sense that you must define what the scope of the Business Rule is: either tied to a particular form of the entity or simply set to run on “all forms”.

What can you use Business Rules for from a process automation perspective? Similar to the Business Process Flow (BPF) process type, Business Rules can be used for guiding the data entry and update tasks by dynamically changing the UI presented to the user, based on the values of other fields on the form. Typically CRM entities end up having far more fields available than what a user is really expected to fill or even view in a particular stage of a business process. Whereas the Business Process Flow can only touch the Process Control shown on the top of the entity form, Business Rules can manipulate any field on the form, setting it either as visible/not visible, required/not required and disabled/enabled. They also have the ability of presenting field specific error messages if a user tries to deviate from the intended process.

Business Rules have a similar type of conditional statement setting as workflow processes do (if/then), but it is quite a lot more limited currently than the workflow editor options. For instance, you can only reference fields from the same entity you’re working on, so setting the requirement level of a contact form field based on the parent account record’s values won’t work. You are also limited to only specifying a single set of conditions that must all be true for the action to run. In order to build an “or” rule to cover multiple alternative conditions you’ll need to save your first Business Rule, then create a copy of it with Save As and have as many concurrent rules as there are options in your “or” statement.

Unlike the Business Process Flow processes that are only able to present fields from the entity, Business Rules can actually update the record as well. The “Set field value” action allows you to input either a static value, copy the value of another field (on the same record) or perform a simple +/-/* calculation with two fields. For an in-depth list of Business Rule capabilities and considerations, look no further than this excellent article by Jesper Osgaard on Understanding Portable Business Logic.

This first release of Business Rules for Dynamics CRM 2013 addresses many of the common scenarios where Javascript has previously been applied on entity forms to make them dynamically adapt to the business logic of an organization. However, there remain some frequently requested features that will still require form scripts to be developed, such as:
- Create dependent optionset fields (filtering available values based on another field)
- Set dynamic default values (“task deadline today+3 days”)
- Show/hide form components other than fields (tabs, sections, subgrids, iFrames, Quick View Forms etc.)
Based on the fact that Business Process Flows are categorized as a process record in CRM 2o13 whereas Business Rules are “only” a component of an entity, should you spend more time designing the Business Process Flow and resort to Business Rules only when you need to tweak some details on the forms? I personally don’t think that the BPF Process Control is necessarily the only right way for implementing guided processes in CRM 2013. For a transactional record with a linear process consisting of several stages with clear boundaries (the sales opportunity scenario) it is surely a natural fit, but in many situations the flexibility provided by the field level configuration of Business Rules can prove to be a more practical approach. At least ask yourself these question before committing to a BPF based design: 1) does it offer some required functionality that Business Rules could not replicate, and 2) can the process data naturally fit into the stages that the Process Control will display?

Real-Time Workflows: Plug-ins For The Analysts

For the past 10 years the Dynamics CRM workflows have been tirelessly performed their tasks behind the scenes, driven by the time slots that the asynchronous service on the CRM server has kindly allocated for them. Originally designed for executing workloads that didn’t have a need to present the results immediately to the same end user who triggered the event, they’ve since been frequently leveraged also in process automation tasks that would have performed much more smoothly with a synchronous execution (also known as “poor man’s plug-ins”). The powerful process automation capabilities presented in the workflow editor would have often been enough to meet the business logic customization requirements, had it not been for that delay in the logic’s execution that demanded the same logic to be replicated in custom code instead.

In CRM 2013 workflows have now been promoted to a 1st class citizen status by adding one tiny switch: “Run this workflow in the background [yes/no]”.

Why is this option of running workflows synchronously so important then? Well, if you’re just using your workflow to send an email notification to someone, there’s precious little difference in whether the action takes place immediately or after one minute. However, if you are updating the current record that the user is currently viewing through the entity form, the fact that you can present the changes right away opens up a whole new world of opportunities for leveraging workflows to guide the business process.

Nowadays when the new CRM 2013 entity form design leans towards a dashboard style of summary views presenting a number of subgrids of child entities, activities or activity feed posts, the need for immediate feedback on the UI applies also to the creation of related records through workflows. If your business process relies on the assignment of tasks to users rather than the “mark completed” checkbox driven style introduced by the new Business Process Flows, the fact that the user will see the process automation in action as he updates the records in CRM will surely help to build confidence in the system’s ability to manage the business process and distribute information to all relevant parties, without the need for manual emails or phone calls to coordinate the work.

From a development perspective, Real-Time Workflows have a similar but likely far more significant impact on the division of labor between the business analyst and the .NET developer than the new CRM 2013 Action processes that we covered in part 1. Synchronous workflow processes can cover many of the common CRM customization scenarios that would have previously required developing a plug-in. While a custom plug-in will naturally still remain far more flexible in terms of its ability to query and manipulate data, the Real-Time Workflows will drive more and more custom code to be developed as Custom Workflow Activities rather than plug-ins.

This is because of the fact that if you can isolate your code into a component that the business analyst can call from a standard workflow process, the configurability of the business process automation functionality will be greatly enhanced as future adjustments to the process can be performed through the CRM UI without touching any code. The development of re-usable components that extend the default capabilities of workflows also lowers the barrier of applying the same custom logic into new processes as the needs of the customer organization evolve.

The less people it takes to solve a business problem through CRM and the shorter the lead time from identifying the problem to deploying the solution is, the more likely it is for the problem to get solved. This is the main reason why increasing the share of configuration tasks over development tasks is so critical for any business information system that needs to adapt to changing business processes and not just fulfill a static set of requirements. If you’ve worked with CRM systems beyond their initial implementation projects, you’ll surely know into which category these systems fall into.

The Growing Business Process Automation Toolkit

If we compare the old and the new world of process automation in Dynamics CRM, we can see that the tools available for no-code configuration of business process management functionality have grown considerably over the past few years:
- CRM 4.0: workflows
- CRM 2011: workflows, dialogs
- CRM 2013: asynchronous workflows, real-time workflows, dialogs, business process flows, business rules, actions
What this means from a system administrator, customizer or business analyst perspective is that if you haven’t yet started to take advantage of the process automation capabilities of Dynamics CRM, you’re really missing out on a significant share of the platform’s potential value to your business. At the same time the growing number of options in CRM can make it seem like an increasingly difficult topic to approach. How do you know which one of the six tools to pick for building a solution to a business problem you’ve identified?

As discussed in part 1 of this article, Business Process Flows are essentially just a map of the process that you present to the end user, but they don’t perform any actions on the data on their own. Since the Action processes are currently only valid for scenarios that involve a developer resource, we can also leave those our when exploring the right tools of how to get started with CRM process automation. That leaves us with four tools to evaluate for their fit to get the job done. I’ve compiled some of the main characteristics of each of them into the following table to help you in the selection process:

You should pay attention to the following constraints of each tool when analyzing their fit for the task at hand:
- Business Rules are the only way to perform actions right after the user updates a field. Workflows will not fire until the save event (which can be 30 seconds away in the new auto-save CRM 2013 organizations).
- Workflows will run even when the records are created or updated through other means than the form (data import, integrated systems). Business Rules are only executed on the form.
- Due to the aforementioned limitation, Business Rules also only ever apply to a single record at a time.
- Workflows can reference data from related entities for read/update. Business Rules can only work with data available directly on the form.
- The special capability of Business Rules includes manipulating the UI (hide/show fields, set requirement level, show alerts). Workflows only deal with the data.
- Dialogs are a manually initiated subset of workflow functionality with a specific Wizard style UI. They also have one special skill: querying data from any entity, not just the directly related ones.
I hope that this article has managed to highlight the new features in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 that can help you build solutions for guiding the user through a business process and automate the related tasks. There is a lot to explore in the latest CRM release in this area and I’m sure we’ll discover many creative ways for applying these new tools in practice as more and more customers move onto the CRM 2013 / Fall ’13 platform.
October 29, 2013
Getting Your Head Around Dynamics CRM 2013 Processes – Part 1
Workflows have always been a central part of the Dynamics CRM product. The typical need for having workflow functionality available in a CRM application has revolved around the sales force automation (SFA) requirements of implementing a sales process with predefined activities to be completed in different stages. As the Dynamics CRM product has evolved and expanded over the years (see this article for the complete timeline of MS CRM history if you’re interested), new capabilities have been added into the workflow engine, expanding the realm of possible use cases where workflows can act as the tool for automating data entry tasks, notifying users of important events or enforcing custom business logic in the various processes that CRM has been put in place to manage in customer organizations.

Initially workflows were purely background processes not intended to be visible to the end users, but in CRM 2011 a new feature called Dialogs was introduced. This enhancement gave us the possibility of building “interactive workflows” with a user interface for both presenting output as well as collecting input from the user. As a result, the terminology in Dynamics CRM was adjusted slightly in the 2011 release, with the new Process concept being used to cover the two subcategories of Workflow Processes and Dialog Processes.

The latest CRM 2013 release takes things even further on the process automation front and introduces several new features that greatly expand the platform capabilities. We’re increasingly moving away from the separation between interactive data entry forms and asynchronous background processes, towards a new reality where the core CRM product offers configuration tools for building applications that adapt to the actions of the users in real time and guide them through the business processes interactively.

Due to this expansion in functionality, the concept of a “Process” in Dynamics CRM has gotten a bit more complex than what it used to be, since a process can nowadays mean so many things. Looking at the Process Center in CRM 2013, when you click the “New” button you’ll now be presented with a selection of 4 different process categories: Action, Business Process Flow, Dialog, Workflow.

While this categorization may be perfectly valid from the platform’s perspective, I’d don’t think this is actually the most logical way to approach the available process automation capabilities of Dynamics CRM 2013. The UI presentation of the process categories ends up grouping together functionalities that are conceptually quite far apart and also leaves out some notable new possibilities that should be considered when building solutions for Dynamics CRM 2013.

In this series of posts I will try to describe how I see the current process management toolkit of Dynamics CRM and provide some guidance on which particular tool to pick up in various customization scenarios. I’ll start off by covering the two new process categories of Business Process Flows and Actions.

Business Process Flows: The Visual Process Map

The one feature that immediately stands out when launching a CRM 2013 environment and navigating to a transactional record like a sales opportunity or a service case is the new Process Control shown on top of the entity forms. This graphical representation of the business process related to the record in question is an awesome way to visualize the stages of a linear process to the end user and it will surely be the single most important feature to increase the utilization of Dynamics CRM 2013 business process automation capabilities in customer environments.

What’s really important to keep in mind, though, is that the Business Process Flow (BPF) process doesn’t provide any process automation functionality in itself. It only allows you to define the stages of the process and the fields to be populated during the stage, but the BPF won’t perform any actions on its own based on the user’s inputs. You can specify that certain fields in a stage are mandatory before the process can move onto the next stage, but you can’t enforce any other consequences. For this you will need the help of other process automation tools in CRM 2013.

Another key consideration for Business Process Flows is that moving between process stages is something the user needs to perform manually. There is nothing in the BPF editor that would allow you set conditional logic like “when fields A, B and C are filled, move the record to Stage 2 of the process”. You can leverage the Dynamics CRM platform for building such automated stage changes, but you’ll need a bit of custom code to achieve it. Refer to this blog post by CRM MVP Scott Durow for more details on how to programmatically manipulate the process and process stage fields.

Business Process Flows are essentially the way how you map out your processes to be presented to the end user. On the customization side they bare more resemblance to the entity form designer rather than the traditional workflow process editor, since you’re mainly configuring what fields to present in which stage, rather than building conditions or defining automatic actions that should take place when the conditions are met. In most scenarios you will find yourself leveraging BPF’s alongside other process types to bring in the automation part of process management.

Actions: Components of Custom Processes

While BPF’s are highly a highly visual component and therefore easy to grasp, the new Actions introduced by CRM 2013 will surely be competing for the most difficult feature for a system customizer to understand in terms of how and when to leverage them. Simply creating a new Action process in CRM won’t give you too many clues on how they are different from the traditional processes and after saving the process you’re left wondering how exactly you would trigger the Action.

In my mind the new CRM 2013 Actions bear a resemblance to a business logic extensibility feature that has been with us since CRM 4.0: Custom Workflow Activities. Rather than being a replacement, Actions are more like the other side of the same coin. Let’s compare the two:
- Custom Workflow Activities can’t be built within CRM but you can leverage them inside a workflow process through the graphical process editor UI.
- Actions are exactly the opposite: you can build them within the CRM process editor but you can’t use them anywhere without custom code.
What this means in practice that in a simple no-code CRM environment the Actions process category won’t be a relevant feature for the system customizer (at least in their current form). In a more complex environment they can provide a new practical method of keeping the organization’s business process logic outside the custom code that is being developed for UI customization and integrations with external applications.

Thinking of a real world scenario for Custom Workflow Activities, if a business analyst is using Dynamics CRM workflow processes to automate a service case SLA management process and wants to configure notifications based on the number of business days that a case record has been open, he won’t be able to achieve this with the built-in workflow date calculation tools. However, he can request a .NET developer to write a Custom Workflow Activity that will perform the required date calculation and then include this as a component in his workflow process. This will allow the actual business logic around SLA management to remain configurable in the workflow process, which means any future changes to how the case record needs to be updated, which person is notified of SLA violations etc. can all be implemented without touching the custom code that’s used only for calculating the number of business days between two dates. Also, since the custom code is isolated inside a Custom Workflow Activity, it can be referenced in any number of workflow processes.

Looking at this scenario from the Actions perspective, let’s say that we have integrated the Dynamics CRM case records into a portal or other custom application that consumes and updates the data in a similar way as the native CRM web client does. All of the entity metadata will be already be available through CRM web services, but with the help of Actions in CRM 2013 we can also expose a piece of our custom business logic to the integrated applications and manage it in one place through the CRM UI. The example that Microsoft has used while explaining Actions is service case escalation, in which the business analyst could configure all of the steps included in the escalation event (activities, case routing, service contract updates etc.) through a single “Escalate” process and the other applications could then call this message defined inside the Action. Input and output parameters can be defined for Actions to allow them to reference the correct CRM records and also provide CRM data back to the original caller.

As we can see from this scenario, just like the Business Process Flows, Actions alone won’t perform any automated tasks inside CRM. They can be used as components in defining automated tasks that are triggered based on an event that came from somewhere else, through the CRM web service. If you’d like to see how Actions might be called from a custom button in CRM through Javascript, have a look at Gareth Tucker’s great blog post on this topic.

The Real Process Automation Tools in CRM 2013

Now that we’ve gotten the two new process categories of Business Process Flow and Actions covered, it’s time for my favorite new features in CRM 2013: Business Rules and Real-Time Workflows. Even though Business Rules aren’t formally categorized as processes in CRM, and Real-Time Workflows are presented as just an extension of the existing workflow processes, in practice these are the features that deliver exactly what a CRM end user would consider as “process automation”, due to the immediate feedback that they can provide.

In the next part of this post I will explore how these new tools compare to the existing Workflow & Dialog features and how they can be combined to deliver a configurable process automation experience that goes beyond what the previous versions of Dynamics CRM had to offer.
October 26, 2013