Recently I came across requirement for calculated fields in MS CRM, it was a case when customer wanted to calculate automatically SLAs . I could develop plugin/workflow for that but I really didn’t want to reinvent a wheel (the only case when is worth to reinvent the wheel is when you need/ want to learn more about a wheel) 
, so I went to Goog. I meant almighty Bing and search for add-on which could help and I found one called N52 Formula Manager. I saw some other reviews of the product at Richard Knudson’s blog and so I thought I’d give it a try. Guess what it does what is says and even more . My key requirements were around calculating an SLA date on the case entity, including the following,
Each time a case gets created set the ‘Follow Up By’ date-time field based on the service level
- Need to take into account a working day between 8:00 to 18:00
- Need to allow for holidays which are defined in the Dynamics CRM business calendar
- Need to allow for weekends
Pretty standard requirements so I started to play with that tool and it’s great, there is a lot of examples and it looks like you can code but it’s simpler N52 Formula Manager has a powerful configuration UI which is like the Plugin Registration but in a much simplified layout.
Bellow is a “some working” version of the formula I created . The core of the formula is a case statement which looks for either Gold, Silver, Bronze or an empty service level. Plugin would take definitely more plus think about redeploying, here you just change a formula.
GetNextWorkingTime function takes into consideration business closure dates (Settings -> Business Management -> Business Closures) so my requirement was met without any change , and you know what’s even more interesting 10 formulas are free I was impressed by that good tool so I decided to blog about it.
Links
p.s
During that Bing(Go) search I also found two very useful add-on catalogs worth too look at them .
