Monday, June 2, 2014

Dynamics CRM 2013 - Part II - Service Queues and Routing

As I mentioned in my earlier post, there are a few additional goodies in the CRM Online Spring 2014 release that are currently available to new customers (and existing customers, depending on the roll out schedule). In this post, we will take a look at the revamped service queues and the routing rules.

Under Settings/ Service Management, there are a couple of items under Case Settings (shown highlighted below) that will be the focus this post.











Queues in Dynamics CRM:
One of the biggest changes to the service queue is the concept of public and private queues. While creating a new queue, the queue type can be set either as a public or private queue.



















If the queue is set to Private and the record is saved, the Members subgrid is available for use. Additional users or teams can then be added to the queue as members. Note that there is no restriction to the Business Unit hierarchy when selecting members. This means that the member list can be a mix of any BU within the organization, and they all would be able to view the records in the queue.















Also from the screenshot above you will notice one additional difference in the queue form - the list of queue items are available for view as a subgrid.

An user who is a member of a certain queue can either pick a queue from the queue list or just select to see the queue items that belong to all queues that the user is a member of. Pretty nifty!



















Routing Rule Sets:
CRM 2011 and 2013 versions of Dynamics CRM added a case to a queue by creating a new queue item record which would contain the details of the case and the queue. The Routing Rule Sets is a packaged way of getting to the same result with a few enhancements. The routing rules are kept separate from the workflows, and there is a filter criteria which can be used to pick the right case list to apply the routing rules.

Under Settings/ Service Management, click on Routing Rule Sets and create a new rule.


















Add a new rule item via the Rule Items subgrid.






















Note that using the rule criteria, I have selected that this particular routing rule applies to all cases that are of priority "High". If that condition is satisfied, the case is added to a "High Priority Case Q", or it can be assigned to a particular user or team.

Go to the case list and pick a few cases that contain a mix of both high and normal priority. Select the "Apply Routing Rule" button in the ribbon, and once the rule is applied you will notice that high priority cases have been routed to the appropriate queue per the configuration.














Note that for the routing to happen, the user has to manually apply the routing rule to the case(s). If the user creates a case, the routing rule is run, but there are a couple of conditions that are evaluated before the routing rule which sets the background workflow as successful and exits.The job record gets deleted once its complete, so I had to take this screenshot when the workflow was in status "waiting for resources".
















A case create or update does not trigger the routing rule, and if the need is for automated routing, old fashioned workflows is the way to go.

Thanks for reading!

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