[email-III] Automatic Record Creation Rules intro

In my previous posts, I described how to create a common mailbox and handle the creation of contacts. In this new article, I´m going to introduce the Automatic Record Creation rules and some of their latest features. Automatic Record Creation Rules have been a useful tool to enable non-developers to create business rules around emails and other activities. For instance, creating a case to wrap conversations.

The Automatic Record Creation rules were initially introduced in Dynamics CRM 2013, with the logical name covertrule, and since then they have been available in the Service Management section:

These classic rules already have several flexible opitons:

These classic rules allowed you to create actions which could even trigger a classic workflow:

With the introduction of the new Unified Interface in 2018, this administration section has been migrated to the Customer Service Hub app and they have been enhanced to support Power Automate Flows:

In this example, I’ve created a rule to monitor email activities in the common mailbox I introduced in previous post. There are some Advanced options that allows us to customise some additional actions:

Some observations I’ve noticed even before actions haven’t been defined (by actions I mean the related convertruleitem records that would create a case record for example):

• When the option “Allow emails from unknow senders” is set to No and AutoCreateContactOnPromote is true:
  • new incoming emails are placed in the queue as inactive queue items
  • email is still created in Dynamics and you could find it under the activities views
  • a contact record is created for unknown senders and associated to the email
• When the option “Allow emails from unknow senders” is set to No and AutoCreateContactOnPromote is false:
  • new incoming emails are placed in the queue as active queue items
  • email is still created in Dynamics and you could find it under the activities views
  • no contact record is created for unknown senders

With the Release 2020 Wave 2, a new option has been introduced to have more control around the unknown senders:

• When the option “Allow emails from unknow senders” is set to Yes, “Manage unknow senders by” is equal to “Creating a new contact automatically” and AutoCreateContactOnPromote is false:
  • new incoming emails are placed in the queue as inactive queue items
  • email is still created in Dynamics and you could find it under the activities views
  • a contact record is created for unknown senders and associated to the email
• When the option “Allow emails from unknow senders” is set to Yes, “Manage unknow senders by” is equal to “Mapping in Power Automate manually” and AutoCreateContactOnPromote is false:
  • new incoming emails are placed in the queue as inactive queue items
  • email is still created in Dynamics and you could find it under the activities views
  • no contact record is created for unknown senders

This last case is interesting. “Mapping in Power Automate manually” means that it will follow the Power Automate flow defined in the actions, which we don’t have at the moment. In my next post, we will see how to introduce conditions and actions (a Record Creation and Update Rule item [convertruleitem]) and the connection with the “Manage unknown senders by” option.

And remember, only one rule per queue and activity type can be active. This means if you activate a rule, the previously activated rule will be deactivated.

Please notice this is the system information at the time of this post:

• Environment with Customer Service and Sales Enterprise Dynamics 365 apps enabled
• 2020 release wave 2 enabled
• Server version: 9.1.0000.25547
• Client version: 1.4.1809-2011.1