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CRM User Notification Emails for new & infrequent users of Dynamics CRM

May 31, 2009

An issue we commonly run into, especially with new CRM users is the problem of getting them to check for newly assigned activities, cases, or other CRM "assignments". Many users can be remote or don't normally log into CRM because they're not in the habit yet.

Bitp Tags: workflow, productivity

To get around this problem, we created some workflows and a couple of simple modifications designed to support e-mail notifications to users about new CRM assignments that they need to look at. We also made it possible for the users to adjust what kind of notifications they were getting so that users who are in CRM everyday don’t get overwhelmed with e-mail notifications.

The first change that we made was to add a notification pick list attribute to the CRM user entity, shown here:

Next,we created some workflows that would send e-mails to users who are configured to have e-mail notification. To reduce the number of unnecessary notifications, the first step of the workflow to see if the owner of the task is supposed to get notifications and that the owner of the task is different from the creator so that you don’t get an e-mail to tell you that you created a task for yourself.

We create similar workflows for cases & opportunities etc. We also used the new business productivity acceleratorto generate a link back to the actual entity to make it easy for the end users to get to their new task.In situations where you might have an Internet facing deployment and are not sure whether users will be accessing from inside or outside the network,you build two links:one for internal access and one for extra access, as demonstrated in this e-mail: