Apex Blog

Playing with Dynamics CRM you probably faced many times the necessity to schedule workflows. (No) Big surprise…there is nothing OOB available! In this post I collect all the approaches and solutions I spotted or used through time.

When talking about scheduling workflows we have two main scenarios:

1. Recurring workflows: WF to run periodically (hourly, monthly, …) or based on conditions (birthday greetings, warranty end reminders,…)
2. One shot delayed workflows: you simply have to schedule WF one time in the future

This post will focus on scenario no.1. Scenario no.2 can be targeted as a specific case of scenario no.1 or creating a workflow with the scheduled delay and running it by hand (on-demand process).

Methodologies

1. Using the Bulk Deletion Process to Schedule Recurring Workflows http://www.crmsoftwareblog.com/2012/08/using-the-bulk-deletion-process-to-schedule-recurring-workflows/
2. Trigger custom entity + Bulk Deletion Process http://blog.clickdimensions.com/2013/01/how-to-schedule-workflows-in-microsoft-crm-online.html
3. Wait step and child workflow http://www.powerobjects.com/2016/07/11/setting-up-recurring-workflows-in-dynamics-crm-2016/
4. How to create a repeating schedule workflow rule https://crmbusiness.wordpress.com/2011/02/11/how-to-create-a-repeating-schedule-workflow-rule/

Packaged solutions

1. Alexander Development Workflow Scheduler(http://alexanderdevelopment.net/post/2016/09/19/updated-solution-for-scheduling-recurring-dynamics-crm-workflows/)
2. North52 Scheduler (http://www.north52.com/business-process-activities/scheduler-for-microsoft-dynamics-crm-xrm/)
3. Workflow Automation (for Dynamics CRM 2011) (https://workflowautomation.codeplex.com/)

The winner is…

All above solutions do work and each one has pros as well as cons (free vs pay, on-premises vs online, customizable vs uncustomizable, DIY vs solution, …).

As Apex CRM team we currently applied some of above approaches. Since it’s release we really loved Alexander’s solution and we applied it to our latest projects. Why we love it?

• easy to configure and monitor
• works on both Online and On-Premises
• free

We’ll keep on working with Alexander’s solution and any related news will be posted here.

Scheduling definition sample

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