I am looking in to creating a notification function in Dynamics 365, and to find the best solution, I have began with searching for the possibilities (Javascript/C#/All others). Example: Sending a user a notification that a new lead is created.
Edit:It should be generic and easy to add a new notification. So maybe it should be a workflow step, or connected to an entity.
Email notification is already integrated in Dynamics 365
Microsoft Graph has a Notification possibility (Only in Beta)
https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/graph-explorer#
Create a custom entity which. And on dashboard add a Web Resource (Javascript) that looks through the entity to find if there are any Records on the current user. If so make a popup.
Use Chrome extension to notify user.
(Example: https://community.dynamics.com/crm/b/bruce365usingdynamics/archive/2017/11/02/announcing-365-notify)
Is there any other possibility you know of?
Or do you have any experience with any of these. What one should go for or not.
Your best bet is Dashboard with Posts in Timeline/social pane. This just need couple of configurations like Post rule, Timeline embedding in Dashboard & user training.
Activity feeds
Activity Timeline
If not, timely workflow or MS Flow to send a digest notification.
I would say if you wish to go code less solution then use Workflow
and place trigger as you wish. Send an Email to Either team or
particular user from this workflow. Just set regarding in Email as
Account or Contact or any entity from which you have an Trigger. By
this way You can see all these notification in your Social pane
timeline as well.
If you need some custom logic, Use plugin but in turn call a
workflow which will be onDemand workflow and this will only be used
to send Email.
There can be different Ideas as well. But we have this in place on one of our productive system and it fulfilles requirement of Notification very well.
Since you specifically want to interact with users within the CRM system, there are a number of simple approaches:
Task Queue (Passive) -
Create task records within CRM (these can also sync to Outlook if you want to get fancy). Users review a queue containing all of their tasks. You can similarly assign tasks to teams of users. I recommend this approach for CRM oriented users who have a number of different tasks.
View/Report/Dashboard (Passive) -
Create views of records requiring action. Users then review these views on a regular basis. I recommend this approach for non-time sensitive tasks, and tasks executed in bulk across many records.
Email (Active) -
Create a workflow with a Send Email step. This is easy to do but could generate a lot of emails which the users may then ignore. I only recommend this approach for rare notifications, or those requiring urgent action.
Emailed Reports (Active) -
A hybrid of the second and third approaches, there are third party solutions that will email view results to users on a scheduled basis. This would be my recommendation if you want an active approach without spamming users constantly. These are easy to install and configure and entail a small cost.
In addition to the many viable options offered above (a few of which I was unaware), if the user's daily responsibilities include working with Leads, you might want to keep it super simple - create a My New Leads view and instruct them to check it throughout the day. You could even place this view on a dashboard, making your option 3 redundant.
If the user rarely needs to concern themselves with Leads, the need for a notification strengthens. Assuming that the Lead volume will not flood their inbox, in the interest of simplicity you could start with a workflow email notification.
Related
We engage with external vendors on daily basis. However they use some kind of ticketing tool to respond to our mails. Every time they respond to our mails, it adds extra RE to the subject, which ends up creating a separate thread. So for a single case/conversation, we end up getting multiple threads which gets hard to track. Is there any solution in outlook which can group all conversations by removing all RE's from subject and show it together. Is there any good plugin/Add-in which we can use for this particular case?
Currently the feature you're looking for, is not a part of the product.
We track Outlook add-in feature requests on our user-voice page.
Please add your request here with the label “Type: product feature request”.
Feature requests on user-voice are considered, when we go through our planning process.
Our company wants to know when the case activity is 75% of the original estimated hours.
However, I think that might be a bit of a tough call.
So, can someone explain how to send an email notification from Microsoft Dynamics CRM when someone logs any kind of "case activity" against a case? I am happy to use .NET code if necessary.
Create a workflow against the 'case activity' entities, add a condition to the workflow to only send an email when the the 'case activity' is related to a case. E.g. regarding case contains data.
I would prefer a Plugin for this kind of thing because you can do a lot more within a Plugin's context.
This is what I would imagine:
Whenever an activity record is created/modified/deleted; if it is regarding a case, the plugin will execute:
Get all regarding activities for the case
Sum up the Duration
If the Duration Total is 75% of the Case Estimate then fire a
workflow
The workflow will then be configured to send an email. By combining the plugin with a workflow, you allow the email to be configurable if the wording/recipients/from needs to change in the future.
I would probably also pass in the 75% as a configuration setting to the plugin so that this is also semi-configurable (doesn't involve code - but you'd need to modify the plugin registration).
The plugin would need to cater for
New Activities being added
Existing Activities being edited (Duration and/or State changes)
At first I thought you would also need to handle Deletes, but that would drop the Duration below the 75% so you wouldn't need to send an email.
If a customer schedules a service activity using my web application and I want to send them an automated confirmation email, it seems I have two options:
Have the workflow create and send a new email message. On this view (see below), you can use fields from related entities on the service activity (e.g. the customer's first name).
Have the workflow use an email template. It seems that email templates do not allow you to access fields from a related entity, like first name, so the only option here is to address the customer by their FULL name.
Are there any solutions that I missed, or am I stuck with the first option if I want to address the customer in a personal, natural way on this automated email?
Unfortunatly, the CRM is pretty limited on that aspect. The best workaround is to add the firstname to the Service Activity entity. May suit you or not. Otherwise, it is achievable through a the SDK, but that's much more complicated if you don't already use it.
Been moving into some task oriented UI as a part of my CQRS implementation.
The problem is I have come across the need to update additional properties in my UI as a result of a change made by an initial command sent from the same UI.
My case is different but here's an example...
eg. CommandA Add item to cart resulted in the following events (which all need to be reflected on the UI)
change to store inventory
add item to shopping cart
change total with sales tax
What's the best way to handle this without baking my business logic into my UI?
return a list of resulting events that were performed as a result to the initial command?
return a DTO that reflects changes
other ideas?
I haven't completed it yet, but my idea is to use a Hub from the SignalR framework and subscribe to events and act on them. As long as you can correlate user guids with the connected user guids in SignalR, you can send updates to the correct client and even detect if they still are there.
SignalR isn't that mature yet but the tests I have done works pretty good.
I use it with Knockoutjs and I just update my view models and call functions.
Do those events really need to be reflected in the UI? Consider Amazon, who display "you just added foo to your cart", but don't show any of those other details. That might save you from the problem by redefining it away.
Otherwise, why are you afraid of business logic in the "UI" - specifically, why not include some components from the service that owns each part of that system in your client, and give them the responsibility of doing whatever local updates are appropriate?
In other words, having part of the logic from your sales tax service running in the UI is fine. You (obviously) don't trust it with the billing calculations for tax, but you can totally trust it to do the right thing for the client.
The other advantage of that model is that you get instant feedback for the user, or at least the option of showing instant feedback, without baking more business process knowledge into the client.
For example, recalculating shipping takes time to do - if your client shows a spinner over that, something needs to know to trigger that showing up, right?
If your UI knows that, it has embedded business process around the process. On the other hand, if you have code that is part of the "shipping" service, you can change what response occurs in the client by changing only the one service...
I'm wondering if there is any way to be able to include an arbitrary email address as the To:, From:, CC: or BCC: fields of a send email activity? It appears that they must be contacts in the CRM.
I ask this because I have a requirement to cc a known group email (no actual user associated with the email...something like support#mycompany.com...though it's not a queue at all). I'm concerned that if I create a CRM user for this email, that when I move to production, I'll have to change all the workflows using this email to point to the CRM entity on the production box (assuming GUID is saved with activity).
If an arbitrary email isn't possible, any other suggestions?
I'm not quite sure, if I have unterstood your question right:
You want to create a workflow which contains a send mail activity. You would like to set one of the address fields (To:, From:, CC:) to a plain mail address like 'foo#bar.org'?
It is possible if
you enter the mail address by hand (do not use the field assistant)
you have configured that e-mails with unresolved recipients are allowed to be sent.
See Settings -> Administration -> System Settings -> E-Mail Tab
you don't want to set the e-mail address with another workflow step
To my knowledge, the only way to do this would be to create a custom workflow assembly. This may be more trouble to you than it's worth.
I doubt it. Not without horrible SDK or Custom Workflow Activity machinations, which even then may not work. Unless you have a truly gargantuan number of workflows that must be altered, the manual approach may be the best.
It may be a terrible hack, but you might be able to replace instances of the development environment support account GUID with its production counterpart directly in SQL Server. Not in the SystemUserBase table, but in whatever workflow activities mention the support account as a CC field in an e-mail. But that is scary stuff.
You may also want to take another look at your process; a significant portion of Dynamics CRM is dedicated to handling support issues, and that includes fairly robust e-mail tracking and storage; there probably shouldn't be a need to CC this support mailbox to which you refer.
In summary: All of the options I've listed are terrible. Find a way to avoid them. :-P
I've had this requirement before, and even with workflow activities, there doesn't seem to be a way to handle this (even though CRM will allow it through the UI).
Your instinct is right that if you create a user separately in both environments and then try to move a workflow that references that user between the environments, that the workflow references will have to be updated.
The best solution, to me, would be to go with just creating the contact/user in one environment. But then, create the contact/user in your other environments with the same Guid. You can do this through the API quite easily, or for a no-code solution, there is a Microsoft provided CRM Configuration Data Utility (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd442453.aspx) that you can use. (Note that the utility will want to migrate all records from the chosen entity, so you might want to export it to a file, edit the resulting file which is just XML, and then import to your target).
This is something that you can do with CRM 2011, CRM 2013, or CRM 2015 if you have a custom entity that is email enabled and then copy the email address from your core entity even if that email address is in a custom text field to it and relate it back via a lookup field. Doing that would require a plugin in Microsoft CRM 2011, but is possible to do with real-time workflows in Microsoft CRM 2013 and Microsoft CRM 2015. This method would allow you to have email addresses associated to the records and available for usage with the CRM workflows to send emails without needing to create an additional user or contact record. This is also handy if you are working with an entity like Incidents that is a core CRM entity and is not email enabled, yet you wish to be able to send emails related to that entity. You could use this method in conjunction with the steps ccellar provided.
I've got a blog post that goes through an example of this here: http://dynamicsuniversity.com/steps-to-send-emails-to-custom-email-address-text-field-from-a-workflow/
You can write custom workflow or you should go for plugin development.
You will get details for it on below blogs.
For custom-workflow
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg334455.aspx
Blog:-
https://lakshmanindian.wordpress.com/2012/10/14/custom-workflow-activity-in-microsoft-dynamics-crm-2011/
more knowledge on your email sending requirement.
https://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/375f5dad-0382-4112-ab0d-5b42ba235d96/crm-2011-workflow-sending-email-problem?forum=crmdevelopment