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
Related
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.
Is it possible to create a meeting or appointment on someone else's Exchange 2010 account, without them needing to accept the meeting? Ideally, we want to have a delegate account, or similar strategy, to place appointments/meetings onto people's calendars. We want to bypass the normal request/accept model, and force these meetings into the calendar.
I looked at CreateItem() in the Exchange 2010 documentation, but it is unclear as to what happens once the method is executed. Does the user receive a normal invitation? We don't want that. We want a model where our system has full control over the users' calendars, without them receiving a traditional meeting invitation, and with automatic acceptance. I would prefer not to have to use VBA hacks or plugins, also.
I think it's possible in case of usage ApplicationImpersonation (the usage of ImpersonatedUserId). It 's important that you have to configure the Exchange first. Then you can set NetworkCredential use ImpersonatedUserId to direct access to the destination calender. See here for more information and the code example.
What I would do is grab a copy of MFCMapi (mfcmapi.codeplex.com), and then create a meeting request in a traditional way and send it to a couple mailboxes. Accept it in a couple, mark tentative in a couple, etc.
Take a look at the resultant calendar item created in the invitee mailbox. I expect you should be able to create the appointment and then set the necesary MAPI properties to make it appear as accepted. You can set the arbitrary properties with EWS, it's just going to take a bit of digging to figure out which ones to set. MFC Mapi is a good tool for that.
On the organizer side, you'll need to make some tweaks so it looks like everyone accepted.
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.
We are constructing an application that will be interacting with Exchange 2007 calendar functions. We will be using the Outlook Redemption Objects dll’s. Our design relies upon the outlook 2007 meeting Category features. We would like to ensure that specific mailboxes have a standard set of category names and colors.
We can’t rely on users to set these up. We also can’t rely on users running the exchange client, many users will be on MAC’s and will be using OWA to manage their calendar.
As I understand it the master category list is stored in each users mailbox in an hidden message in a property named IPM.Configuration.CategoryList. I haven’t found any reference on how to set this yet.
The only things that I have found to help us are:
Group policy objects: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc179073.aspx As I understand this, it won’t manage the color’s and relies upon the exchange client.
A third party tool - http://www.vboffice.net/product.html?id=2006063&cmd=detail&lang=en&pub=6 The enterprise edition appears to do what we want but is expensive for a once per mailbox operation on 100 or so mailboxes.
Basically, our preferred solution is to be able to produce a script that accepts a mailbox name and sets up a standard master category list.
we were able to accomplish our task using the code at http://gsexdev.blogspot.com/2007/08/adding-categories-to-master-categories.html
AFAIK, the categories for mail box items are stored in local outlook profile and not on the exchange server.Before Ol 2K7, these were stored in registry so I doubt if category master list can be set on E2K7.
I want to create a small survey in an email message. The user are to respond using free form text boxes, check boxes , or pre-defined drop downlist . I see applications that claim to be able to do that. my needs are not that elaborate. Just a few questions that need to be asked
In Outlook 2007 there is functionality to create polls (Voting) which may satisfy your needs:
This feature requires you to use a Microsoft Exchange Server 2000, Exchange Server 2003, or Exchange Server 2007 account.
A demonstration is provided here.
You can simply include this as a normal HTML form in a mime part. See http://abiglime.com/webmaster/articles/cgi/010698.htm for how to do that.
However, many email clients will not display this. For example, in Thunderbird, there are settings for displaying message: "Original HTML", "Simple HTML", "Plain text". It will only display a form if it is set to "Original HTML".
Additionally, you may get security warnings from some email clients when trying to do the actual post from your email message over to the web site (I'm not sure about that as I've never tried).
I can see the appeal of making a survey easy to use in an email, but you should at least provide alternate links to access the survey on a website for users that can't see the form. And be sure to test this using a wide variety of email clients, eg: Thunderbird, Outlook, Outlook Express, Gmail, Yahoo, MSN/Hotmail,...
Cant you use HTML to make it work?
You can create a custom form within outlook that contains the controls you want. Use that form when creating a new email message. That will work.