How run a scheduled workflow in microsoft dynamics CRM without using scheduler on server

1. Customize the ‘target entity’ if necessary, for example: if you want to countdown the days until a project must be completed, you could add a field to a “project entity” named “Days until completion” to be set when the project is created and that will be edited daily by the recurrent workflow. In this case, the custom “Project” entity is the ‘target entity’.

2. Create a custom entity; in this case I named my entity: “Workflow Assistant”. This entity will contain the name field, owner, an optionset (a.k.a. drop-down menu) field and a lookup to the “target entity”. The Target Entity is any entity that drives the process.

3. Create a workflow triggered by the Target Entity (I.E. A new project has been created). This workflow will create a ‘Workflow Assistant’ record to be deleted by the recurring bulk deletion job you will create on step number5.

4. Create a workflow triggered by the deletion of the Workflow Assistant record, this workflow will perform the recurring task and create a new Workflow Assistant record to be deleted on the next cycle thus making it recurrent.

5. Create a Bulk Deletion job set to delete the Workflow Assistant records created by the two workflows from step3 and4 and configure the frequency (I.E. Every1 day).

Here is a diagram describing the process detailed above:

Unfortunately, there were a lot of details involved on the configuration of this functionality so I have decided not to include all the screenshots and make this post too long and cumbersome, if you need more details please watch the video below; I have also included two additional examples to illustrate the capabilities of this simple solution; on the first example I will show you how to configure a recurring workflow to count the days a Lead has been neglected (I.E. Not contacted), on the second example I will show you how to configure a recurring workflow to send a weekly sales pipeline report to selected users:

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM Asynchronous Processing Service (maintenance) service records an event when the job scheduler, a component of the service, completes a maintenance job and includes the task type, and start and finish time. To view these events in Event Viewer, sort on MSCRMAsyncService$maintenance. For example, the event here is recorded for the Reindex All maintenance job, which is task type30, and had a duration of one hour.

Depending on when the organization was created, some maintenance jobs may run when users are accessing the system. During this time Microsoft Dynamics CRM users may notice a decrease in performance or timeouts. For example, when maintenance jobs run during late morning hours while users are accessing Microsoft Dynamics CRM, form loads and saves may occur slowly. Here are some options available that let you reschedule or postpone Microsoft Dynamics CRM2011 maintenance jobs.