How-to series: Change activities’ status when closing opportunities
Okay, this post is a response to a good question made by someone on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM forum (for Partners).
The initial question was:
“Hi All,
When an opportunity is cancelled, the activities (tasks, appointments, etc.) are not being flagged as cancelled and staying considered as “open” items. We need to find a solution that when an opportunity is closed (or cancelled) that all associated activities tied to that opportunity be deleted. Can i automate the above process? I tried using workflow, but i am not able to trigger an Activity record.
Regards,
VP”
A response from Dylan Haskins pointed to a really cool workflow plugin called ‘Distributed Workflow’ and available on Codeplex here.
How useful are the workflows?
Well, this might be an interesting question after all…
My client wanted me to update one field (a bit field) on more than 400 contacts, and I didn’t want to convert the Excel file into a CSV because of the special characters involved, so I looked towards the workflows instead.
And this is very helpful since you can always specify the fields you want to update on the target entity; then you select one or more records and you apply the new workflow, supposing you created a “On-demand” workflow, and TADA…you’re done!
How can I export my workflows?
Do you remember the good old Microsoft CRM 3.0? Do you remember how you could export your custom workflows in those good ol’days?
Well you simply had to launch the “Export workflow wizard”, select the workflow(s) you wanted to export and click on “export”
But in those new times of 4.0, how can you achieve this?
Notify case owner of closed task
A simple workflow can always help in the following scenario: the case owner wants to be notified whenever a task linked to his/her case is closed upon completion.
