CRM Workflow - An Overview

Workflow in Dynamics CRM comes under Process and it’s a great way to automate the simple/complex Business logic. The great deal about workflows are that you can initiate them without any user interaction. Workflows are specific to a single entity, which has been chosen at the time of creation of workflow. CRM gives you feasibility to run the workflow synchronously (real time) and asynchronously (in the background).

Properties of Workflow

When you create a workflow there are few component that must be entered to start a workflow:

Process Name: Process name helps the user to identify which process they have created. It’s not necessary that the name should be unique but it will be more convenient if you have a unique one for all the workflows.

Category: In Process Workflow is one of the category, the other process are Action, Business Process Flow, Dialog. While creating the workflow you need to choose “Workflow” as a category.

Entity: You can choose OOB as well as custom entity for your workflow, but only one entity can be selected at a time.

Run this workflow in the background: This is the default option that get selected while creation and it’s an asynchronous process. You can start a fresh workflow by choosing “New Blank Process” or choose an existing template by selection “New Process from an existing template (select from list)”. While customizing the workflow you can choose Activate as: “Process Template”. This property you can change at any point of time.

Once your workflow gets created you need to customize the workflow according to your requirement.

Following are the components that you need to consider before customizing the workflow:

Convert to a real-time workflow: By selecting this option you allows your workflow to run synchronously. Real time workflow will not work if you have a wait condition in your design.

As an on-demand process: This option allows to trigger workflow when the user wants to run it. This option will be available on entity record as “Run Workflow” command.

As a child process: This option allows the workflow to be available to trigger as child workflow from other workflow.

Workflow job Retention: This property is having one option i.e. “Automatically delete completed workflow jobs to save the disk space”.  By selecting this option user allows to delete the workflow job after execution.

Scope: Scope is an important part while creating the workflow by selection wrong scope the performance of it may be affected.

1. User: This option will run the workflow only for the record that have same owner as the workflow.
2. Business Unit: This option will run the workflow for the record owned by user belong to same Business unit as the owner of Workflow.
3. Parent-Child Business Unit: As the name suggested for this option the workflow will run if the record owner will belong to the same BU as workflow owner or the Child Bus.
4. Organization: This option will allow to run the workflow for every single user.

Starts When: Here comes the option when you want to trigger your workflow. There are total five option on which you can trigger the workflow.

• Record is created: As simple as the name explains it, this option will trigger the workflow as soon as the entity record will get created.
• Record status changes: This option will trigger the workflow when the record status will change. Example: from Active to Inactive.
• Record is Assigned: If this option is selected the workflow will run when the ownership of the record gets changed.
• Record Field Change: This option will trigger the workflow for a specific field value change. When you select this option you need to select the field.

• Record is deleted: Workflow will trigger when the record is deleted.

Note: Customization of Workflow will be available in the next Blog.