Case Study: Alert for Old Cases

I was recently approached at a conference about a unique question on the best way to do something in Dynamics365. The question led to a very interesting discussion because I realized that there were actually many possible ways that the objective could be achieved. So today I’m launching a new recurring Case Study mini-series where I will be doing a deep dive into solving unique issues or answering unique questions from all across the CRMUG Community.

The question that started all of this was ‘what was the best way to use a workflow to send an email when a case had not been modified in 5 days?’ In addition to the multiple ways this could be accomplished, now that we are in the days of the Power Platform, using a workflow might not be the best choice. So I want to talk through a few possible solutions to this.

The Problem

The team is using cases to handle customer issues. Some of these issues can take several days or longer to resolve. Management wants to ensure that customers are still getting periodic updates on these cases. It is important that the technician working on these cases is aware of cases that have been sitting without update for an extended period of time.

Possible Solutions

Lets talk about a few possible options or components that we will explore further over the next few days:

• Calculated Field to show Number of Days since the case was modified or Rollup Field to show the Last Contacted On date based on related activities
• Views and Charts to highlight cases based on these fields and information
• Recursive Workflow with wait condition (we will discuss the pitfalls of this approach)
• Workflow using a related record as a trigger
• Simplified version using FLOW!

I am not going to talk about SLAs and Escalations at this time. I am not as familiar with those features and that will be a challenge for another day!

The Goal

My goal will be to show a few possible options along with notes to keep in mind with these solutions. Please feel free to jump in with your ideas as well!

Next time, we’ll look at using Calculated and Rollup Fields. Be sure to let me know in the comments below if anyone has solved this problem in their own environment? How do you handle it?