How to Create Custom Activity Feed Posts in Microsoft Dynamics 365/CRM

The Posts or Activity Wall on the social pane of a Microsoft Dynamics 365/CRM record is an easy way to keep up on important events at a glance without having to leave the main page.

You might see information like an opportunity for an account was won or one of your customers just opened a new service request.

While this type of information is important, it may not be important enough to warrant creating a workflow that sends you an email. After all, everyone is probably already getting too many emails as it is!

To cut down on some of the noise in your inbox, items that are not critical can be posted to the activity feeds area where you can review the information at your convenience.

Out of the box, there are a number of pre-configured events that can be enabled.

To find these, look under Settings -> Activity Feeds Configuration. You’ll find over 30 entities listed in Post Configurations.  Each entity has a number of related out-of-the-box rules that can be activated.

To Activate an existing rule typically requires two steps:

First, ensure the entity is Active in Post Configurations. If not, select the entity and click Activate. In this example, we are activating the Appointment entity. You will need to Publish the entity for this change to take effect.

The second step is to activate the appropriate Rules for that entity.  Open the entity record in the Post Configuration list and review the Rules list, Activating or Deactivating as desired.

If there is an event you’d like to be notified of that doesn’t already exist in the rules you can always create your own with a simple workflow. As an example, we’ll create a post when a new order is created for an account.

The setup is straightforward – create a workflow to run against the order entity. For the starting criteria, have it run when the record is created.

You will only need a single create record step that generates the new post record. Here you can enter the text you would like displayed in the post body. Make sure to set the regarding field so it shows up on the correct record’s wall.

Save everything and activate the workflow.  When you create a new order, a post should appear on the wall.

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