Tips and news about building custom Workflows in CRM 4.0 ‘Titan’

Cesar De la Torre

In TechReady5 (Seattle, July 2007), I attended a nice session about building workflows in CRM-Titan (next v4). Here I post several tips & news:

Titan hosts Windows Workflow Foundation but in a different way than SharePoint 2007.

Asynchronous Host
– Multitenant / stateless
– Scalable
– Reliable
– WF (Windows Workflow Foundation)
– Extensibility Mechanism
– Concept of Personal Workflow

CRM V3 workflow vs. Titan worlflow
– Not very configurable vs. Web Based
– V3 didn’t support UPDATE. No we can Update even at Attribute level.
– V3 supports less entities. Titan supports many entities, event Custom Entities.
– Flow control – ELSE in Titan
– Flow control – Parallel Wait in Titan
– Create Records. In V3 quite painful. In Titan we have a standard form to make it easy.
– Relationships. Much more events.
– Dynamic Expressions. We have now in Titan a Dynamic Expressions Assistant.
– Process Definition. Can define different stages within a Workflow.
What’s new
– Personal Workflows (ie End users can create workflows)
– Richer
– Visible
 o Contextual visibility. Drill down from entities to the actual workflow.
 o Workflow data available for reporting/advanced find/export to excel

Custom Workflow Activities

– Custom WF activities should be build with VS.2005
– Custom WF activities should be registered with CRM using the Web Service APIs
– Custom WF activities cannot be registered in CRM Live!!

Developing Titan Activities with Visual Studio 2005

If we want to develop with VS.2005, we need all the WF development stuff plus another Titan-WF Add-inn.

Workflow deployment can also be made with VS.2005 Titan Add-in.

Cesar De la Torre Principal Program Manager, Azure

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