Typically the prefix describes the job function or even company department which helps you group workflows visually on the screen.

Here is an example:

This technique can be very effective should you have multiple pages worth of workflows.

• Add a Lead, Contact, or Account to a Marketing List
• Remove a Lead, Contact, or Account to a Marketing List
• Verify that a Lead, Contact, or Account is a member of a Marketing List

Read more about the Marketing List Manager on our product page.

That work has resulted in an article on the CRM Team Blog.

I walk you through creating workflows that use the Marketing List Manager to add and remove a Contact from a marketing list.

You may view it here, under the Additional Downloads section.

New Name

The new name is Marketing List Manager for Dynamics CRM

New Functionality

Marketing List Manager is an plug-in that allows you to both add and remove members from a marketing list – a feature that is not currently available in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.

Read more about it here.

We noticed and issue last week related to how the users were actually processing the activities that would result in the workflow failing.

It turns out the users were changing the value of the picklist we use to move activities between queues and also closing the activity as completed.  This caused the workflow to fire because of the change in the picklist but since the activity was already closed, the workflow failed because it tried to update a closed record.

To prevent this occurrence from happening, we need to insert a bit of code at the beginning of the workflow to check the activity status:

So when we start the workflow, we check the status of the activity ( a fax in this case ) and if it is either Completed or Canceled, then we stop the workflow with a status of Completed.

This will prevent the workflow from attempting to update a closed activity.

Let’s take the following example as a “surprisingâ€? way.  I have entered some sample data, but after I entered the data, I realize that I really didn’t make most of the records verbose enough to be useful, as you can see from the following screen shot:

I now have two choices: Edit by hand all of the single-word records or come up with some fancy bulk editing technique to get the work done for me.

Let’s go with option number two and see where we end up.

What Won’t Work

I can’t use the bulk edit feature because I want all of my records to be different.

I also don’t want to edit them by hand, as mentioned above.

Finally, I don’t want to write any code because that would be a real waste of my time.

How about a Workflow?

Have you ever considered using workflows for editing?  No?  Well then, let’s give it a shot.

Step 1: Create the workflow

This is pretty basic workflow at this point.  We have given the workflow a name and selected the entity, which is a custom entity called News.

We’re using CRM Online so the Scope defaults to Organization.

Finally, we will be executing this workflow manually so we want to clear all of the check boxes except for On demand.

Step 2: Add a workflow step

Now we need to add an Update step to our workflow.  In this step, we will be updating both the Headline attribute and the Body attribute, as you can see below:

If you look closely at what we’re updating we are adding new text into each field then we are adding the field to itself.  Huh?  Will that work?  You bet.

Here is what is happening ( using the Headline attribute as an example ).  We are actually performing the following calculation:

“This is important news headline number “

+

[the existing contents of Headline]

Which results in something like:

This is important news headline number one.

We then perform a similar calculation on the Body attribute.

After publishing our workflow, we can put it to use.

Step 3: Executing the workflow

After returning to our News View, we need to select all of the News records that need to be updated.  When you click run workflow button, the following dialog will appear:

You need to click OK to select the workflow then OK again to run actually it.

Step 4: Viewing our results

After waiting a short amount of time for the workflows to execute, we can then refresh the News view and see the results of our handiwork:

Is that not cool or what?

Conclusion

So what did you think?  Does that open up your eyes a little as to the possibility of using workflow to edit data?

And how long did it take?  Less than two minutes. And that is with me taking screen shots and pasting them into Windows Live Writer so I could write this article.  Since it was only two fields, I could have actually done the whole thing in less than a minute if I was really trying.

Good luck with your own workflow efforts.

So why would this be useful and how would you use it?

That’s the question I have been asking myself for quite some time and to be quite honest, I really didn’t have an answer until a couple of weeks ago.  Here’s what I’m doing:

The Scenario

I am starting a new venture which involves providing Internet-based training for CRM users.  The training will be broken down into courses and lessons – pretty standard stuff.

I decided that I would like to have a marketing list for each course so that I could communicate with each person who had purchased the course.

The Solution

Create a workflow that will automatically create the Marketing List when a new Course is created.  Here’s what the main workflow screen looks like:

The workflow needs to fire when the Course is created.  I also added On demand so that I could start the workflow manually.

There is only one workflow step involved, which is the actual creation of the Marketing List record, and I’ve supplied the following fields:

The name is the Title from the Course.  The Member Type is Contact, since all of my users are Contacts. And finally, the Purpose is just a summary of reason for the Marketing List exists.

Conclusion

While it has always been easy to create new records using CRM workflow, I think the use of automatically created Marketing Lists is pretty unique and I hope this inspires you to rethink the use of CRM workflows.

Finally, you are probably wondering how members of the Marketing List are maintained.  This is pretty simple: When you purchase a course, the code-behind the web site automatically adds you to the Marketing List for the specified course. This means there is zero used-intervention in this entire process.

This workflow is based the Task activity, but you can perform the same process on other activities as well.

The workflow will execute when the record’s status changes.

Here is a quick picture of how it is configured.

Our first check is to see if the Task was closed with either a Completed or Canceled status.

If so, then we check the owner.  Is it the same person who created it?  If not, then we will send an email to the creator of the Task, using the following email:

When published, the workflow will generate an email that looks like this:

They move activities from one department to another by setting a Current Stage field to indicate the current state of the work being performed on the activity.  It looks something like this:

Routing Activities to Queues

On of the rather interesting things about the CRM 4.0 workflow process is that you can actually route activities to a queue by simply assigning the activity to the desired queue.  I use that technique in the following workflow:

This workflow works using the following criteria:

• When an email is created
• When the attribute Current Stage is modified

The workflow will review the value of the Current Stage attribute then assign the email to the appropriate queue.

Note: To make things easier for the user and administrator, we make the Current Stage picklist values and the names of the queues the same.

For each activity type that you need this process performed on, you’ll need to add the Current Stage attribute to the form, then create a corresponding workflow rule to handle the routing.

Conclusion

While this solution may not seem like much at first, it does showcase the power of the CRM 4.0 workflow process and can save small amounts of time that add up to big overall savings.