Assigning records to a Queue
CRM MVP Kuba Skalbania is our guest blogger today. Kuba walks us through the concept of queues and record ownership.
As most of you probably know, records owned by any user in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 can be assigned (‘assign’ action) to other users and they can be shared with other users or teams (‘share’ action). In CRM 4.0 records cannot be assigned to the team or any other record than the system user. (Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 will introduce team ownership).
However, some of you might have noticed that every activity and every case can be “assigned” to the queue (at least that is what the UI says):
Following such an “assignment” the activity goes to the appropriate queue and it can be taken from there by any user. Ok, so since it was “assigned” to the queue the owner field of the activity changed to the queue, didn’t’ it? The answer is no; the owner of the activity or case assigned to the queue remains the same.
So, what is going on? Is this assigning or not really? The point is that the activities and cases are in some way “shared” with the queue, not “assigned” to it. They are shared and remain shared until any user accepts that particular activity or case and assigns them to themselves. Then the activity is no longer shared with a queue, and the old owner is changed to the new one. It is easy to spot that by “assigning” the particular activity to the queue without being its owner, the activity will remain assigned to the old owner, but is also visible in the public queue for other users.
