This page will answer key questions on the AgileXRM product. For the full details, please visits the official website.

Why should you care about it?

The more critical your business applications become, the more complex the underlying process logic evolves into. Microsoft Power Apps and Dynamics 365 CRM can handle all the detailed data capture and management tasks at ease, yet they aren’t ideal for showing you the big picture of how it all works.

There is no true Business Process Management (BPM) capability in Microsoft Power Platform. No, Power Automate is not that thing. It’s a technical component of the solution, a tool for the developers (be it professional or citizen). Your end users aren’t intended to see it or interact with it. They are supposed to use Power Apps. Which is great at generating a list and forms UI on top of your Dataverse data model.

No single thing in the Power Platform architecture represents your actual business process. Microsoft’s platform gives you flexible tools to build the solution and nothing purpose built to visualize, operate, monitor and manage it. Which is precisely what AgileXRM does give you.

If you’re not happy with merely trusting that everything is working fine, that the users are doing what they should, that the developers have understood the specifications – perhaps it’s time to add a Business Process Management layer on top of your application.

What does it look like for the user?

Let’s say you have a business record in your Dynamics 365 CRM app / model-driven Power App, like a Purchase Request. It has a lifecycle and it needs to go through many stages. Several users will be involved in various related tasks along the way.

Where would they see what’s happened before and what should happen next? That’s the neat thing: they don’t – in the default Microsoft UI. Unless you have a process visualization add-on that ties it all together. That’s what the Process Manager in AgileXRM does:

“Couldn’t I use the Business Process Flow (BPF) feature in Power Apps to do this?” Sorry, BPF’s don’t actually automate anything. They are primarily a stage gated data entry/read form type. You can’t drill into the details, nor step back to see the big picture of the process. They only answer the question “what” - not the “who”, “when”, “where”, “how much” or “why”.

“I don’t really want to confuse my app users with all the process details like that!” You definitely shouldn’t. Yet you need to guide them to do the right thing at the right time, so that it all works throughout the process steps. How are you going to ensure this? Via user training and system documentation?

If only there was a wizard type of a UI that would guide the users through a complex data entry process, step by step. (There was such a feature introduced in Dynamics CRM 2011. Then Microsoft removed it from the product and replaced it with… nothing.)

You’re in luck today: say hello to AgileXRM Dialogs.

This will both hide away the process complexity and enforce the process logic at the same time. For every user – be it your internal Dynamics 365 licensed employees or external customers and partners. Because why would you reinvent the same solution to different audiences via different technologies in the Microsoft Power Platform (internal Power Apps vs. external Power Pages)?

How can I design and update my business processes?

Usually when dealing with a complex and long-running business process, there’s going to be one or more developers that translate the business process into technical architecture for the Power Platform. No matter if it’s done as no-code, low-code or high-code – it’s rarely an easy thing to communicate between all the related parties.

What if the business process owner could draw it as a Microsoft Visio process diagram and then turn that into a working automation? This is precisely what AgileXRM Process Modeler does. It offers a “What You Model Is What You Run” experience. (WYMIWYR – you read it here first!) Draw the workflow logic in Visio, then leverage the AgileXRM specific activities to turn those shapes into real-life actions:

No real business process ever remains the same if it’s actually in operational use for years. If you only drew the Visio flowchart once at the start of your system implementation project, it’s bound to be outdated by the time you’ve gone live. What this means is that no one can show you what the current, operational business process logic actually is. You have to just trust it to work the way someone once described it to the developers (who have since moved on to different projects).

There’s only one way to solve this dilemma: make the process design document be the process configuration source of truth. That’s how AgileXRM works. When (not “if”) you need to update the process, you open the original workflow diagram in MS Visio, perform updates, then click a button in the UI to deploy it into Microsoft Power Platform. Now you’re done. Plus, this is the only way anyone can do it. Full ownership and control of your own business processes.

Why should I trust this product?

Because it’s not yet another cloud service that has been “integrated” with Microsoft Power Platform. It is built exclusively for this platform. That means the company is all-in with the same exact technology choice as your organization is: Microsoft business applications cloud. This is 100% what the team focuses on.

The term XRM is what the technical platform was called, before Microsoft invented the Power Platform brand. “Any Relationship Management” (yeah, it doesn’t quite spell “XRM” but anyway) is what the foundation beneath the CRM product is known as. AgileXRM has evolved from this era and grown alongside the Power Platform as it has broken into the mainstream in the age of cloud.

It’s been around since 2006, as part of AgilePoint, a general-purpose BPMS vendor. Then AgileXRM span-off in 2020 to focus exclusively on Microsoft business applications BPM. It has been built to address a gap in the Microsoft product offering – just like a 3rd party solution from a Microsoft partner should. It combines two Microsoft products, Visio and Power Platform, in a way that has not been natively done. (Don’t even look at the current Visio and Power Automate “integration” if you don’t want to ruin your day.) The product has been serving customers of Dynamics CRM, Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and now Power Platform, with some running up to 15 million process instances per month.

It's not a preview of something that may eventually work. Rather it’s built on technologies that have been proven to work. It keeps evolving alongside the MS product offering, completing their global, mainstream software products with a targeted, high-value capability that addresses the current BPM needs of many organizations running their business on the MS cloud.

Can’t I just wait for Microsoft to build something like this?

Microsoft entered the CRM market in 2003. They haven’t yet entered the BPM market. How many decades can your business wait for built-in features for complex and long-running process management? What’s the financial impact to you if it never happens? Is the BPM market even lucrative enough for MS to justify building a new product that could challenge established players?

Today, Microsoft is “the Copilot Company”, according to their CEO Satya Nadella. Generative AI has to be the solution to everything they do – which means they have to discover the problems it can solve. The challenge here is that generative AI is scientifically speaking a very advanced bullshit machine (ref. “On Bullshit” by Harry G. Frankfurt, 2005). Note that this is not a negative thing in all occasions. It just means you need to carefully think about where BS can serve as a useful fertilizer for your business systems - and where it may be harmful.

Summarizing emails and drafting plan documents is a great use case to be powered by BS. Can your business processes run on BS? Do you need it to be 100% reliable, to work the same way each and every time? Then forget about relying on BS to be the foundation of your solution. Instead, look for ways how generative AI can augment the business process orchestration machine. Like calling AI Builder capabilities from Power Automate cloud flows that get triggered as part of your AgileXRM managed business processes.

Okay, so what should I do next?

It’s as easy as A-B-C:

A) Go to the main website of AgileXRM and check out their videos to see the product in action. Then, once you are familiar with the idea of the product, fill in your name + email in the contact page. A human from AgileXRM will then reach out to you and help you with the steps to get it running in your organization’s environment.

B) If you’re not yet ready to present the business case internally for subscribing to the AgileXRM service, start with the Community Edition. It’s free, forever. Then, once you’ve seen that this solution fits your business needs on a broader scale, go to step A).

C) Still got some doubts? You can reach out to me directly and have a conversation in private, to figure out if this product is a good fit for your situation. I’ll give you my honest opinion, like I always aim to do. Because this whole ecosystem runs on trust and that is the most important thing for me to establish between us individuals.