How often haven't you been asked for a new custom form to consolidate related entities for data capture?
Quite often i guess. Me too.
I recently wanted to bring something "new" into considerations for a client who was stocked in the decisions process for user friendly layouts.
The standard entity forms became too overwhelming in number of clicks and different forms popping up during the process of capturing data to Account, Contact, Opportunity and a custom entity. After quite a few iterations of presenting mock ups, discuss the adjustments to meet an acceptable usability level, modifying mock ups, presenting again and so forth - I brought in the suggestion of using process dialogs.
And to my surprise the feature was accepted after 10 minutes with the following argumentation:
- Full control for system administrators to add or modify process dialogs
- Flexible way of building up data entry forms for a specific purpose and with context driven tips added to each control
- Out of the box functionality that assumably is compatible for future releases of Microsoft Dynamics CRM
Totally under judged be my and most of my fellow colleagues.
Here are some tutorials from around the web that illustrates the advantages and limitations of using process dialogs:
- https://community.dynamics.com/crm/b/crmteamblog/archive/2011/02/02/welcome-to-the-world-of-dialogs-part-1.aspx#.UhxLERbFbGw
- http://intellicore-ltd.blogspot.dk/2012/12/workflows-vs-dialogs-microsoft-dynamics.html
And if you want to bring it a step further having buttons to activate a specific process dialog without going into the entity for the dialog:
- http://barrycrm.wordpress.com/2013/07/30/how-to-initiate-a-dialog-from-a-custom-button
