Why Can’t I Email a Team in Microsoft Dynamics CRM?

Beringer is striving to create real value in our customers’ CRM systems. We enjoy developing creative solutions to limitations in CRM. I recently had a design challenge to send out notification emails to a Team in CRM.   This currently is not possible using the Standard Workflow Send Email Step since Teams are not able to be set as an ActivityParty.  So, how do we extend Standard Workflow functionality?  I knew to turn to a custom plugin to accomplish my task.

I’m going to walk you through the usage of a Custom Plugin I’ve designed to take a Team and an Email created through the workflow, and send that Email to the provided Team. Typically, a standard workflow sends an Email through the “Send email” step.

This will create an Email like you would in CRM and send it to your recipients. However, CRM does not allow for Teams to be a member of an ActivityParty. If you attempt to, your workflow might fail and state that it “Cannot create an activity party of the specified object type.”

Team is Entity Code Type 9, thus directing the cause of our failed workflow to the usage of the Team entity. So what do we do? We can put Users into an Email, but not a Team. Well, if a Team is just a group of Users, we can break our Team into its individual Users for the Email.

Team Workflow Logic

We’ll have to use a Custom Workflow to search CRM and retrieve all Users in a Team. The workflow below accepts two inputs; the Team you wish to address in your Email and your formatted Email.

Here I’m checking that the Owner (which will be the recipient of my Email) is in fact a Team. Then I am creating and formatting the Email as I normally would in a Standard workflow. Then feeding the Team I wish to send my Email and the Email in the previous step into the Custom Plugin. You can see the inputs in the View Properties link on the custom plugin.

After running the workflow, you will see all of the Users from the Team addressed in the resulting email’s To field. This will allow CRM to process your Email without failing the workflow.

Beringer Associates, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, is always here to provide expert knowledge in topics like these. Please contact us with any questions you may have.

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