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creating activities from advanced find results

Hi, first time asking a question.

Is there a way to bulk create activities based on the results of an advanced find from the contacts area?

Here's what we're trying to accomplish. We have new contacts added each week. We'd like to bulk create activities for someone in the marketing dept. to send them a welcome letter in 7 days. The next week, another set of new contacts would get added and activities would be created for marketing to send that new group a welcome letter 7 days from when that report was run.... Is this possible?

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

Hi Prep89,

I'm assuming that you are using Dynamics 365 in the cloud.

Do you want to automatically create the email and send it out to the contacts created - or do you want to create a task for a user in the marketing department?

For creating a task, you could create a Playbook template in Dynamics 365 Sales. You can find the Playbook in the App Settings Area in the Sales App. For the Playbook template you also need to set a Playbook category. Then specify the entity for which the playbook should run and then create the activity that should be created for the record types. During the activity creation you can specify after how many days the activity should be created - not all activities are possible to be used in the Playbook - you can only create tasks, appointments or phone calls. Finally you need to publish the Playbook to become active.

If you want to send out the email directly, it is not possible by Playbook, but you could use e.g. a Scheduled cloud flow for this scenario, that will be started e.g. every morning at 9:00 am.

I would recommend to create the flow inside a solution in https://make.powerapps.com - Solutions

Then the cloud flow will list all contacts that have been created 7 days before, using the filter criteria specified in advanced find. If you do not know, how to create the correct filter query, you can do the following:

- Save the advanced find query as personal view

Next step will require XRMToolbox which is a free software by MVP Tanguy Touzard, which includes lots of other tools by other MVPs and community members: https://www.xrmtoolbox.com/

- open the XRMToolbox and use the the FetchXMLBuilder by Jonas Rapp. (If you use XRMToolbox for the first time, you have to download the tools and restart. Then you need to connect to your environment inside of XRMToolbox)

- in the FetchXMLBuilder you can select your saved personal view on the contact entity and then select View - Power Automate in the command bar of FetchXMLBuilder.

- a pop up window with all necessary query information for power automate will be shown.

- use these query information in the filter criteria of your cloud flow (click on the query to copy to clipboard)

The next step in the cloud flow will be create of a dataverse record of type email message. As the previous step is a list records and can contain several results the cloud flow will automatically create an Apply to each for all contacts that match the filter criteria.

In the create step, you can refer to the data of the list all contacts step, e.g. use the contacts email address

Instead of sending out an email, you can use a cloud flow also to create a task for the Marketing user, if the playbook scenario is not working for you.

Best regards,
Joergen

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