Field change notification - any suggestions?

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Dear All

I hope someone can suggest a solution to the following CRM problem.

Imagine the following scenario:

On my Account entity, I have a field called "Office Status". It is an OptionSet field, and can either be "Head Office", "Branch" or "Agent".

I want a user to be able to see Accounts which have had their "Office Status" CHANGED from "Head Office" to "Branch".

The "CHANGED" verb is important here. I'm NOT asking for a way to see all the Accounts which have a "Office Status" of "Branch" (this is easily achieved using a VIEW - that's not what I'm after). I'm asking for a way to see all Accounts that have had their status CHANGED from "Head Office" to "Branch" ONLY. If it's been changed from "Head Office" to "Agent", or "Agent" to "Branch" or to any other combination, I don't need to know.

One way would be to achieve this is as follows: Send an email in an UPDATE plugin. So when someone changes the Account's "Office Status" from "Head Office" to "Branch", then send an email to a group of users (using the SDK in a plugin to send an email). But this doesn't see like the "CRM way" of doing things. It doesn't seem right from a CRM-centric point of view.

I suppose the way that your normally queue-up work for people to do in CRM is to use a dashboard. Not by sending emails. So I suppose the correct way to do this in CRM is to use a dashboard.

But how do I create a view of records that have CHANGED from one specific optionset value to another specific optionset value? Is it even possible to create such a view?

I appreciate your kind assistance.

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Carlo Velasco 787 on at

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Hi Mike

I don´t think this would be possible, as views are filtered through the values on the record.

I can think of two work arounds by using the plugin you already mention or a workflow that triggers on the changes of your field and validates that the change is from "Head Office" to "Branch".

1.- Create a custom two options field name "Notification", when the plugin triggers instead of sending an email it could set this field as "checked", so the next step would be to create a view that filters through the notification field and include it in a dashboard.

2.- Create a custom entity named "Notifications", when the plugin triggers instead of sending an email it could create a Notification record and relate it to the account record, then create a view for this entity and include it in a dashboard.

This workaround is the same concept as the first one but you will be able to include more data to the notification, for ex. "Change Date", "Author of the change", etc.

Hope this helps

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Community Member on at

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Thanks Carlo, yes that does help. I'll use one of those techniques. This is my Accepted Answer.

Thank you for your kind assistance.

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