How to send an email from CRM that shows-up as Meeting invite?

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Hi,

I want to send an email invitation for a meeting to the contact such that it appears as a meeting invite on Outlook. How can this be achieved?

Please advise.

Thanks,

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Community Member on at

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Below are few details:

I know one way is to create an Appointment, sync it with Outlook, add attendees and send invite. But can we do this from within CRM? We have a custom meeting entity and we can add our contacts and employees as attendees. But we want to send an email to all those attendees from within CRM such that it appears as a meeting invite/Appointment.

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Abed Haniyah 4,287 on at

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Dear Fahad,

You can create a workflow to send an email when you create or update appointments.

Regards,

Abed.

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Create a mail message as a custom workflow activity and send it via SMTP :

Develop a custom workflow activity with appropriate input parameters (start time, end time, smtp server name etc.) which you can configure to map to CRM entity fields.

In your C# code, you will need to generate a iCal event. You could do this by reading and understanding the iCal spec and generating a string manually in the correct format like this, or just use a library like the the DDay.iCal library. Note, if you use this library, you will either need to deploy this dll in the GAC, or merge it using ILMerge when you build the workflow activity.

Convert the iCal object back to a string.

Send the iCal as an email via smtp (note, smtp likely won't work from CRM online sandbox, only on premise) but change the content type of the MailMessage to "text/calendar"

Message should arrive as an acceptable calendar in Outlook which will display based on how you have configured the iCal event properties.

Configure the workflow activity against the appropriate entity (Appointment / Service activity).

Sample approach in code below - note, not production ready. You need to understand the iCal properties you want to set and slot this into the boilerplate workflow activity code accordingly.

// 3rd party libraries to reference using DDay.iCal; using DDay.iCal.Serialization.iCalendar; ... ... // Create the iCal IICalendar iCal = new iCalendar(); iCal.Method = "Request"; ... ... IEvent evt = iCal.Create<Event>(); evt.Summary = summary; evt.Start = new iCalDateTime(eventstartDt).SetTimeZone(local); evt.End = new iCalDateTime(eventendDt).SetTimeZone(local); var serializer = new iCalendarSerializer(iCal); var iCalString = serializer.SerializeToString(iCal); ... ... var mailMessage = new MailMessage { Subject = Summary.Get(_executionContext), From = new MailAddress(FromEmailAddress.Get(_executionContext)) }; // Create the Alternate view object with Calendar MIME type var ct = new System.Net.Mime.ContentType("text/calendar"); if (ct.Parameters != null) ct.Parameters.Add("method", "REQUEST"); //Provide the framed string here AlternateView avCal = AlternateView.CreateAlternateViewFromString(iCalString, ct); mailMessage.AlternateViews.Add(avCal); // Send email try { smtpClient.Send(mailMessage); } catch (Exception ex) { // Log it. }

Ref: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24434099/send-meeting-notification-from-dynamics-crm-workflow

I hope it will help

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Community Member on at

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Dear Abed,

Thanks for your response. Will that be shown as a meeting invite to the sendee?

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Abed Haniyah 4,287 on at

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Unfortunately ,no

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Abed Haniyah 4,287 on at

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please check : blog.clickdimensions.com/.../add-email-sends-to-your-crm-calendar.html

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Aileen Gusni 44,524 on at

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Fahad,

Create an appointment everytime you create a custom meeting entity..

And create a plugin ..

Example:

blog.mycrmgroup.com/.../Event-Invitation-tracking-in-Microsoft-Dynamics-CRM-2011.aspx

Another third party:

blog.mycrmgroup.com/.../Event-Invitation-tracking-in-Microsoft-Dynamics-CRM-2011

Hope this helps.

Thanks.

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Community Member on at

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Thanks Aileen,

Your first link is not working. Can we do it not using any 3rd party tool?

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Aileen Gusni 44,524 on at

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Hi Fahad,

Very sorry.

I mean the first link is:

www.powerobjects.com/.../sending-meeting-requests-from-microsoft-dynamics-crm-2011

And the second link is:

blog.mycrmgroup.com/.../Event-Invitations-for-Microsoft-Dynamics-CRM2011

blog.mycrmgroup.com/.../Event-Invitation-tracking-in-Microsoft-Dynamics-CRM-2011

Wrongly copied paste :)

Thank you.

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Community Member on at

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Thanks Aileen,

But this is not what I am looking for. I think a better way to do so is to programmatically send an email invitation. This could be handled via a plugin or custom workflow activity.

Best,

Fahad

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