While the business process flow is a good step in the right direction, often organizations need to create advanced workflows for dynamics, complex scenarios. For such cases, I recommend a third-party Dynamics CRM plugin such as PNMsoft SCE (see www.pnmsoft.com/.../bpm-for-dynamics-crm).

How do I add business process fields to the OOB entity 'Connections'? Is it possible..

As seems to always happen, you post a question only to turn around and find the answer. So, the missing piece to my issue was the 'Stage Category' value in the Business Process Flow. This fields value options is controlled by the 'Stage Category' option set and this option set can be modified by the user. So what I had to do in order to ensure that the Pipeline Phase value properly reflected the current step of the opportunity, was to make sure that the option set contained a value that properly reflected the step then go into the Business Process Flow and set the 'Stage Category' to the appropriate value. Then when I advance the opportunity to the new step the Pipeline Phase field shows the appropriate value and the code associated with it. Now I am still seeing an issue with this new approach as all workflows will need to be built around the Pipeline Phase text field, which means that any tests in the workflow will need to test for characters that are not directly associated with the option set. As a result if someone changes the description in the option set the test in the workflow will not be updated to match the change unless someone does the change manually. It sure would be nice if Microsoft would have kept utilizing the Sales Stage attribute, or a generic attribute that could be added to all entities that use a process flow, have this attribute tied to the stage Category option set, and have the flows current state be reflected in this attribute. That was you can create a workflow that is tied to a defined set of values whose descriptions will change as the option set's descriptions change.

I would like to say that I really like this new approach to handling the current step of a business process, but I am having an issue with the CRM 2013 implementation, it is not working as I would expect.

First off, the 2013 process appears to utilize the following fields:

- Process

- Process Stage

- Pipeline Phase

The UR12 implementation of this functionality utilized the Sales Stage field, but it appears that this is no longer the case. So if you had workflows that fed off of this field they are no longer viable. At least this appears to be the case.

Secondly, the concept of the Business Process Flow allows you to control the look and feel of the steps in the process form, but the ability to report the current step appears to be lacking. My example focuses on the Opportunity entity, which is where I am having my issue. In this entity there is a field labeled Pipeline Phase, this is a text field that appears to be updated by OOB code. The OOB values that are placed in the Pipeline Phase field appear to come from the Opportunity Sales Stage option set, which is not editable so I am unsure how these can be changed to match a business process. If I were to go and change the Opportunity Sales Process, which controls the look and feel of the steps in the opportunity process form, I do not see the changes reflected in the values that populate the Pipeline Phase field and this makes for issues with reporting this current step information to my users. For example, if I change step one from 'Qualify' to 'Started' when I look at the Pipeline Phase field for new opportunities I still see 'Qualify'. If I were to add a new step to the process, say 'Revisited' when I move my opportunity to that step, I do not see this step reflected in the Pipeline Phase of the opportunity, in fact, I do not see it reflected anywhere other than in the Process Stage field and this value appears as a GUID.

With the issue indicated above, how does one go about setting up workflows that set custom fields based on the current step of the opportunity? I cannot use the Pipeline Phase because it does not properly reflect any changes I have made in the Business Process Rule. I cannot use Sales Stage, which was the suggested approach after UR12 and the introduction of the process form, as it appears that this field is not longer used. I cannot use the Process Stage field as it is a GUID and the Workflows will not make use of this field. If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know as I have investigated everything I can think of and am not sure how to ensure that my workflows will keep all of my other field in sync.