Queue entities

Applies To: Dynamics CRM 2013

Queues are instrumental in organizing, prioritizing, and monitoring the progress of your work while you are using Microsoft Dynamics CRM. As a central location for work management, queues assist you in processing cases, responding to service calls, or sending out product information to prospective customers. Programmatically, a queue is a collection of queue items. A queue item serves as a container for an entity record, such as a task, an email, or a case that needs processing.

The following information pertains to queues:

• All customizable entities, business or custom, can be enabled for queues.

• Queues may be public or private. Private queue items are only visible to the members of the queue.

• A private queue is automatically created for each new user or team.

• A queue can contain multiple entity types, such as tasks, emails, or cases.

• A queue contains information about the user who is working on a particular queue item. This helps you manage your resources more efficiently and helps to prevent duplication of work.

• Queues can be enabled for workflows and audit. This helps improve productivity and track the entity and attribute data changes for future analysis and reporting.

In This Topic

Enhancements to queues with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 service pack 1 (on-premises) and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Spring ‘14

Enable entities for queues

Inherit privileges and provide limited access to a queue

Actions on queues and queue items

Enhancements to queues with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 service pack 1 (on-premises) and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Spring ‘14

This section contains new capabilities added to the queue entity.

Members capabilities

Previously each user or team had a default queue and you could create additional queues. To manage access to queues you needed to share or assign them. Now queues are categorized into public or private queues. Private queues have individual users as members to make controlling access to queues easier. If you add a team to a private queue, all the members of that team become members of the private queue.

Prior to CRM 2013 Service Pack 1 (on-premises) and CRM Online Spring ‘14, managing access to queues required sharing or assigning queues. While sharing and assigning still works with queues, the recommended method to manage accesses queues is to take advantage of new capabilities to manage members of private queues.

Public and private queues

The new QueueViewType attribute is a picklist that defines whether a queue is public or private.

After you upgrade to CRM 2013 Service Pack 1 (on-premises) and CRM Online Spring ‘14:

• All user queues become private queues for the user: Only the user will be able to see queue items in their private queue.

• Team queues will be marked as private with members: the team owner and all team members will be able to see the queue in the application.

• All other queues become public. Everyone with read privileges for the queue entity will be able to see these queues.

New attributes

The following attributes add new capabilities to managing queues:

New messages

The following messages were added:

• AddPrincipalToQueueRequest
  Use this to add users or teams to a private queue. When adding a team, all the members of the team will be added as individual members of the queue.

  Note

  There is not a corresponding message to remove a user or team from a queue. Individual users may also be added using the AssociateRequest or removed using DisassociateRequest referencing the queuemembership_association many-to-many entity relationship.

• RetrieveUserQueuesRequest
  Use this to retrieve all the private queues that a user is a member of. Use an optional parameter to also include public queues.

• PickFromQueueRequest
  Use this to assign a queue item to a user and optionally remove the queue item from the queue.

• ReleaseToQueueRequest
  Use this to assign a queue item back to the queue owner so others can pick it.

• RemoveFromQueueRequest
  Use this to remove a queue item from a queue.

• RouteToRequest
  Use this to route a queue item to a different user, team, or queue.

Restrictions on deleting queues

A queue cannot be deleted if the following are true:

• When the queue has queue items.

• When any routing rule uses the queue.

Enable entities for queues

To enable a customizable entity, business or custom, for queues, use the UpdateEntityRequest message to set the IsValidForQueue attribute to true. For a list of customizable entities, see Which entities are customizable?. The queue entity and the queue item entity are customizable entities, but they cannot be enabled for queues.

The following list contains default queue-enabled entities in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online:

• Appointment

• Campaignactivity

• CampaignResponse

• Email

• Fax

• Incident

• Letter

• PhoneCall

• RecurringAppointmentMaster

• ServiceAppointment

• SocialActivity 

  (New for CRM 2013 Service Pack 1 (on-premises) and CRM Online Spring ‘14)

• Task

Inherit privileges and provide limited access to a queue

A queue and a queue item have a parental relationship in which operations on the parent queue record are propagated to the child queue item records. For more information about parental relationships and cascading rules, see Entity relationship behavior.

The privileges on a queue item are inherited from the privileges on a queue.

• If you have prvReadQueue privilege, you also have read privilege on a queue item entity.

• If you have prvAppendToQueue privilege, you also have create, update, and delete privileges on a queue item entity.

Often, you must limit access to the queue when permitting access to the queue items. As a queue owner with full access to the queue, you might want to share a queue with a team that will have only limited access to the queue. For example, if the support team is given read and append to privileges on a queue, team members cannot make any changes to the queue, such as changing queue name or queue owner. However, they can create, retrieve, update, and delete queue items.

For more information, see Queue entity privileges.

Actions on queues and queue items

You can perform a variety of actions on queues and queue items, if you have appropriate privileges on the queue entity and the queue item entity.

Actions on queues

Perform the following actions on the queues:

• Customize queues and queue items by adding custom attributes.

• Add an entity record to a queue.

  Note

  An entity record cannot be added in multiple queues. An exception is an email entity record with the status “Received”.

• Add entity records of different entity types in the same queue.

• Change an ownership of a queue by assigning it to another user or team.

• Add principals to a private queue using the AddPrincipalToQueueRequest.

• Clean up the history for a queue by deleting inactive queue items in the queue, such as completed or canceled phone calls.

• Retrieve all the queues that a user has access to using the RetrieveUserQueuesRequest

• Make a queue the default queue for a user by setting the SystemUser.QueueId attribute to the ID of the queue. The same queue can be specified as a default queue for different users.

• Create a workflow that operates on all private queues. For example, whenever a user creates a task, the workflow adds the task to the default queue of the user. You can also create a workflow that operates only on a particular queue.

• Configure an email for incoming messages, if you want incoming email messages to be delivered to a queue.

Actions on queue items

Perform the following actions on the queue items:

• Assign a queue item to a user using the PickFromQueueRequest.

• Move a queue item from a source queue to a destination queue by using the AddToQueueRequest message. A queue item can be moved from one queue to another until it is deactivated by using the SetStateRequest message.

  Note

  A queue item is automatically deactivated if the state of the record in the queue item changed from Active to Inactive. This applies to queue-enabled entities that have Active and Inactive states. To determine if an entity is queue-enabled and if an entity record can be in an Active or Inactive state, see entity metadata information. To view the entity metadata for your organization, install the Metadata Browser solution described in Browse the metadata for your organization. You can also view the metadata for an uncustomized organization in the Excel file called EntityMetadata.xlsx included in the top-level folder of the SDK download.

• Release a queue item back to the queue using the ReleaseToQueueRequest.

• Delete a queue item from a queue by using the DeleteRequest message. When you delete a queue item, a referenced entity record is not deleted. However, when you delete an entity record, all queue items that reference this entity record are deleted.

See Also

AddToQueueRequest
Enhanced service entities
Configure email for incoming messages
Queue entity messages and methods
QueueItem entity messages and methods
Sample code for queue entities
Queue entity privileges
Business management entities