CRM 2011 Rollup 12 (Polaris) Process Driven Forms Editable?

Paul Nieuwelaar, 03 February 2013

With the anticipated release of Dynamics CRM 2011 Rollup 12 (Polaris) and the new Process Driven Forms for Leads, Contacts, Accounts etc, one of the biggest questions was “are they going to be editable?”. The new ‘Windows 8-style UI’ looks awesome, but how flexible is it to xRM customers who want the ability to customize their vanilla forms?

The answer to this question is: Yes! The new forms are customizable… sort of… let’s take a look.

As you can see in the image above, we have our lovely new Process Driven Lead form. For anyone who doesn’t already know, these are the new forms designed for touch devices, to increase productivity. They are designed to contain everything within one screen; without having to open multiple dialogs as you would with ‘classic’ CRM.

To customize these forms, you can go through the form by clicking the ellipsis menu, and selecting Form Editor. Alternatively you can go through the Customization area, and open the form named after the entity, for example ‘Lead’.

With the form open, you will be able to customize it like any other form; by adding or removing fields, or repositioning components. The reason I say it’s “sort of” customizable is because there are several locked components of the form. These are mainly the qualify section in the header, the bing map, and the social section. All of these components are locked, and cannot be changed or removed from the form (although, if you really don’t like them you can hide them away in a hidden tab).

We also don’t have the luxury of adding javascript to our process forms. While the ability to add javascript is not disabled, the events themselves will simply not fire when the form loads. If there are any event handlers being called on the form, CRM will display the 'classic' form instead of the process form by default.

Finally after customizing my process form, I can publish and view the changes. As you can see, I was successfully able to customize the form, by changing the fields displayed in the header, and adding extra phone number fields to the Summary tab.