Dynamics CRM: Workflows revisited

In the third post of my Diving into the sales pipeline series, we covered the creation of workflows to handle the different stages (i.e.: pipeline phases) of the sales process. If you followed the series from the beginning, you would recall that in that example, we did not want users to be able to jump back and forth through the pipeline phases. For example, a user with an opportunity located in the first pipeline phase shouldn’t be able to jump forward without first passing through the second stage, or be able to move backwards in the sales process.

There are a number of reasons why I stuck with this requirement. First, the whole article series is based on the real requirements of one of my past clients, and the client strictly required users not to be able to move back or jump steps forward. Second, this requirement introduced a nice JScript (the bonus JScript in the second post of the series) which handles the hiding of options within an option set based on conditionals. There is a third reason, however. I must say that I was quite comfortable with such “inflexible” requirement: It made my job easier, and thus easier to document it in order to share it as part of the sales pipeline trilogy of articles.

There is a degree of mea culpa here. In the third post of the series, which covers workflow design, I asserted that the online workflow designer for Dynamics CRM doesn’t handle jumping back and forth through workflow stages, like the GOTO statement found in many programming languages. Although this statement is correct if we considering an orthodox view of what “GOTO” means from the mindset of a developer, it doesn’t mean that we couldn’t achieve similar results using the online workflow designer for Dynamics CRM. In this post I will be explaining how we can achieve such results using the online workflow designer. Read more >>