Dynamics 365 (CRM) Scheduled Workflows using Microsoft Flow

Creating scheduled workflows has always been a challenge in Dynamics CRM 365. The community and ISVs have offered several original options, but there is not yet an official out-of-the-box option. This article brings another alternative to the table using Microsoft Flows.

A scheduled workflow is the one that runs at a certain arranged time and it may recur to run again after a period of time. If you want to understand more about this challenge and how our CRM community has resolved it so far, have a look at the following articles:

• http://blog.clickdimensions.com/2013/01/how-to-schedule-workflows-in-microsoft-crm-online.html
• http://www.powerobjects.com/2016/07/11/setting-up-recurring-workflows-in-dynamics-crm-2016/
• http://alexanderdevelopment.net/post/2016/09/19/updated-solution-for-scheduling-recurring-dynamics-crm-workflows
• http://www.north52.com/business-process-activities/scheduler-for-microsoft-dynamics-crm-xrm/

Microsoft Flow offers the option to create Recurrence jobs. This can be used to schedule and trigger actions in Dynamics 365, like retrieve, create or update records (see available actions). So, using this functionality you already have a good alternative to create your own scheduled workflows without development effort. You can see some examples in the following article as well as in these Dynamics 365 Flow templates.

The other alternative would be a mix solution where a recurrence Microsoft flow creates a custom Dynamics 365 “Scheduled Job” record and this triggers the corresponding Dynamics 365 workflow. The “Scheduled Job” entity would have attributes like “Process Name”, “Run as” (e.g. system user name), “Query scope” (e.g. FetchXML or view name), …, to specify what and how to run the workflow. This option would require additional development, either a plugin or a custom workflow activity to call on demand the given process, but it would also allow you to reuse the logic and capabilities you already have within Dynamics 365.

Hope you find this article useful. Looking forward to hearing your feedback.

Thanks