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Running an On-demand Workflow in Dynamics CRM for More than 250 Records

Post Author: Joe D365 | July 30th, 2013

While implementing a CRM solution, you might run into a situation where you need to run a complex on-demand workflow in Dynamics CRM on lot of records—say, more than 1000. This task may take some time, given the fact that you can select only 250 records at a time to run an on-demand workflow in CRM.

To overcome this, you can run the on-demand workflow in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Outlook client. To be warned, this solution only works for CRM 2011 and with outlook 2010.The Outlook client does not have any limit of records per page. You can select any number of records at once and execute any operation from the CRM Ribbon. The best thing is that this is not only limited to workflows!

To run your on-demand workflow for more than 250 records in the Outlook client, follow these steps:

  1. Use an existing view or create a new view with the required filter conditions.
  2. Pin the created view in the CRM for Outlook client.
  3. Right click on the view and select Pin this tab.

    On-demand Workflow in Dynamics CRM for 250+ records

  4. Select all records on the pinned view using Ctrl+A.

  5. On the ribbon, click the Run Workflow button.
  6. Select the appropriate on-demand workflow.

Voila! You'll observe that the workflow is running for the number of records you selected.

Remember, you can perform any operation from CRM ribbon in Outlook on more than 250 records at once. To do this, you'll first need to pin the view in the Outlook client.

We hope this helped you out! If you have any questions, you can always reach out to the experts at PowerObjects for help.

Happy CRM'ing!

Joe CRM
By Joe D365
Joe D365 is a Microsoft Dynamics 365 superhero who runs on pure Dynamics adrenaline. As the face of PowerObjects, Joe D365’s mission is to reveal innovative ways to use Dynamics 365 and bring the application to more businesses and organizations around the world.

7 comments on “Running an On-demand Workflow in Dynamics CRM for More than 250 Records”

  1. I haven't been able to get Outlook to synchronize the list of records, it will only display 250 records at a time, even if the tab is pinned. I tried uninstalling the connector and reinstalling, but no effect. I even uninstalled Outlook and reinstalled it, still no effect. Not sure what's mis-configured in my system.

  2. Yup, me too. Outlook is only showing 250 per page. CTRL-A only selects a page at a time. Is there something we're not doing?

  4. Hello Everyone. Unfortunately, in CRM 2013, there's no way to select more than 250 rows 🙁

    1. Internally it supports up to 500. I was able to trick CRM online to display 500 by going into the settings page, and in the web browser's developer mode I edited the values in the drop down list, adding 500 as an option, selecting that and clicking OK. It doesn't seem to work if I try a higher value than 500 though

  5. Since reading this, a long time ago, I started using CRM 2011 Bulk Workflow Tool. It works with CRM Online 2013. CRM for Outlook is very poorly implemented, I just stay away from it alltogether.

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