Scheduling tasks in Microsoft CRM 2011

Question

I need to schedule the import/ export of contacts in Microsoft CRM 2011 (online and on premises).

I plan to create a custom entity to store the scheduled tasks, and a form to set them up (similar to Windows Task Scheduler).

I am not sure how can I actually execute the scheduled tasks. Does CRM 2011 have a service or API I could use to schedule tasks? The solution must work in CRM 2011 online and on premises. Thank you so much.

Answer 1

Directly from a former Microsoft product team member (Gonzalo Ruiz),

there is no Out-of-the-Box scheduling engine in CRM.[1]

So the answer is no. I recently asked a similar question, and for several reasons, our team decided the best way to go was solution 1: an external task manager (Windows has a few native solutions for this), which would work for both on-premise and online versions. Drawback: you should probably have a reliable server-type machine that you could host the task manager on.

As linked, you can use solution 2, recurring workflows, to achieve a similar result, but there are some drawbacks to this route as well, some of which are mentioned in Gonzalo's blog.