This past month a few questions were asked in the CRM newsgroup and forums about how to trigger reminders off of dates within Microsoft CRM.  I thought this would be a good discussion topic to discuss the options along with some Pros and Cons of each option.

A few examples of the questions we have seen are:

“Let’s say I want to be notified 3 days in advance about birth dates of all the contacts in the system”
“I want a reminder sent to the owner of a case 3 days before the due date of the case”
“Is there a way to send a note to a manager if a case is untouched after 4 hours”

As with most requirements around Microsoft CRM there are multiple ways we can accomplish getting the reminder requested in each of these instances.  When we look at the different ways each one can be accomplished we need to understand what the actual business process we are trying to facilitate is and then look at our options.  Once we know our options and what business process we are trying to facilitate we can then decide based on our company's abilities or the abilities of our implementation partner which approach will work best for us.

Microsoft CRM allows this to be accomplished through many avenues:

• Passively (The user must do something to be reminded); a view or report
   
• Actively (The user receives the reminder without doing anything); schedule a report, creating a workflow or a custom application.

Build a View

The simplest to build is a simple view either via Settings -->Customizations --> Customize Entities or via Advanced Find and then sharing it out.  This view is very simple to create and will show you all open cases due in the next 3 days anytime a user goes to it.

This would make the view available in the case section of Microsoft CRM.  This will work but it requires the users to look at the view each day to make sure there are no cases due in the next few days.  This solution is very simple to complete and does not require any custom code and does not cause any performance concerns.  All you have to do is then train users to look at the view of "open cases due in the next 3 days" and enforce this process with review of the view by managers also to make sure things are happening.

Build a Report

This is the next simplest route to go is to either use the Report Wizard to build a report or use the SSRS report designer to build a simple case report.   If you are using CRM Online then you should use the Report Wizard because currently you are not allowed to load custom reports built using SSRS report designer.  Once you have created the report you can make it available from the reports section and from the case area via the reports icon. 

As with the view this is a very simple way to get this information to your users but it is a passive reminder because the user must remember to run the report each day to see the Cases that have a due date in the next 3 days.  The positives are that if you used the Report Wizard there was no special tool to learn and no custom work to build or deploy and you once again have no performance issues to worry about.

Build a Report and send it via E-mail (Not able to be done if using CRM Online)

If you are using CRM On-Premise you can create the same report using either the Report Wizard or SSRS Report Designer that shows the cases with a due date in the next 3 days.  You can then schedule the report within SSRS to use stored credentials and automatically send the report to a user or a group of users each morning.  This is less passive because the users do not have to remember to go to a view or run a report within Microsoft CRM but the users still must open the report in the e-mail and review the open cases.

Use Workflow

This is possible in workflow depending on how you want the reminder (Outlook Reminder or E-mail) to happen and how your users are using the system. 

If your users are using the Outlook client and synchronizing tasks to their outlook then you can very easily have a workflow on create of case first wait for the due date to be filled in and then create a task due 3 days before the due date that was entered which will pop up in their outlook as a reminder to work on the case.  The problem with this approach is if they do not use the outlook client or decide not to sync tasks to Outlook they will not get a reminder pop up and will then just need to be looking at their tasks due in CRM.  Another problem is if you only want the reminder to go out when the case is within 3 days of the due date this does not work because this will make a task for all cases when the due date is filled out.

A second approach using workflow would be to create a workflow that basically checks once a day and then send out an e-mail to the owner if it is within 3 days of the due date for the case.  This workflow would be pretty simple:

a. It would first have a wait condition that waited 24 hours
b. It would check if they case is still open if so continue otherwise end workflow
c. If the case is still open it would check if the Due Date is less the 3 days greater than the workflow execution time. If so it would create an e-mail and send it to the owner of the case.
d. It would start a new instance of that workflow again.

The good part with this second option is it only sends the reminder if the case is still open and within the 3 days of the due date.  The bad part is that it means you have at least one workflow running for each case you have open.  This can cause a performance burden on your system depending on the number of cases you have.   If you have lots of cases this is something to consider before you decide to implement this solution.

Custom Application

This will be a development effort and you can approach it multiple ways depending on your developer’s skill set and if you are using CRM Online or On-Premise.  Your developers could build a simple tool that runs hourly or daily and it could query CRM for open cases due in less than three days.  You can query against the SQL views (On-Premise only) in the database and send an e-mail or you can build it to query through the API's (Online or On-Premise) and either send an e-mail or create new tasks or e-mails within CRM. 

Summary

The route you choose depends on the actual business process you are trying to facilitate and your company’s abilities or partner's abilities in development and CRM architecture. All of the above will work with varying degrees depending on your specific business process requirement.

- Hoss Hostetler