Hello,
My name is Rubaiyat, and I am one of the newer Program Managers in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM team. Today, I am going to talk about an issue that some customers have faced when using the queue functionality of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and describe a workaround for it.
A CRM user may choose to track an existing email she received by choosing the email and then clicking the “Track in CRM” button, as shown in Fig 1.
Figure 1. Track an email in CRM.
This will cause this particular email to show up in the user’s Assigned queue, as shown in Fig 2.
Figure 2. Email appears in user’s Assigned queue.
The user then chooses to accept this email activity, as shown in Fig 3, and it moves to her In Progress queue.
Figure 3. User accepts email.
The email is now in the user’s In Progress queue as seen in Figure 4.
Figure 4. Email appears in user’s In Progress queue.
This email (which is a closed activity since it has already been sent by someone) then stays in the In Progress queue of the user until she deletes it from the queue. This behavior is by design. This is because even though the user cannot send the email (since it has already been sent), the email content may have an action item for the user. For example, this particular email asks the user where the products she sells are available. The user may want to follow up by sending a reply email to the sender.
Since this email will remain in the In Progress queue of the user, it may clutter up the view, especially, if she receives numerous emails every day. Some users may find these emails very frustrating since, after they have followed up on these emails, they do not require any action, but still take up screen real estate on the In Progress queue view. There is no easy way to clean these emails from a queue.
Workaround:
Emails need to be manually deleted from the In Progress queue. Deletion from the In Progress queue simply deletes the email queue item, which can be thought of as a pointer to the email activity; but it does not delete the actual email activity itself. This is illustrated in Figure 5.
Figure 5. Delete the email queue item from the In Progress queue.
Since only the email queue item was deleted from the In Progress queue, Advanced Find can be used to find this email, as shown in Fig 6. Thus, deleting from the In Progress queue only removes the email from the In Progress queue – it does not remove it from Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
Figure 6. Email activity still exists.
In case the user wants to delete the actual email activity from Microsoft Dynamics CRM, she has to delete it from the Advanced Find view (as shown in Fig 7) or from the Activities view.
Figure 7. Deleting the email.
I hope this information helps in using the queue functionality of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
Thanks,