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Using the Business Productivity Accelerator to generate links to CRM records

May 15, 2009

Microsoft has recently released the business productivity workflow tools accelerator (download here) which allows us to generate hyperlinks in e-mails created from within workflows. We use this to create links that will allow end-users to go straight into CRM record by clicking on a link in the e-mail.

We wanted to be able to generate a link to a specific task that we could e-mail to the user that has been assigned the task. Prior to the publication of this accelerator, we would’ve had to written workflow plug-in. Microsoft did that for us and saved us the trouble.

First we downloaded and installed the business productivity workflow tools accelerator per the instructions included in the download.

Next we created our workflow for the new task entity notification for more on this, see the upcoming blog article on notifying users:

The details for generating a link to a task in CRM using the “generate CRM hyperlink" function of the accelerator are shown here:

The easiest way to build the link, is to open any entity that you wish to generate a link for and click send shortcut option of the Actions menu:

You can now cut the link generated from the resulting e-mail, paste it into the URL line of the custom step input above. The last step is to replace the GUID that was generated with a 0 (id={0} ) which causes the GUID of the current entity associated with the workflow to be inserted into the link when it is created .