Does your workflow has any custom activity?
What about Waiting criteria?

We have a problem that work flows just do not fire. (Workflows do not flow, if you will excuse the pan).

What we find intriguing is that when you look at CRM -> Settings -> System jobs you see familiar entries with system event, workflow extension task and at status of waiting. The wait is “forever”.

We applied hot fix KB957701, it did not help.

Avner

No doubt, work flow provide some really handy out of the box features. In windows service, you need to program everything and they are lengthy but more controlled.

In your case, you can use the windows service and workflows in conjuction. Like you can make your workflow to fire manually and remove waiting conditions. Just a clean workflow to send alerts as per standard template and then in windows service you can program the event and time to fire that workflow. You can fire a workflow using code. Look into SDK and find the relative code. You can even fire a workflow from plugin/javascript. You can fine the code on internet easily.

So you workflow is having the all functionality and your windows service will be having the event and execution code.

There must be some workflow defined on activity that is executed whenever a new email is received. This seems to be an automatic workflow or a plugin.

It is not so complex to write a simple windows service. You can find a ll info at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc301845.aspx

Just create a windows service project using template projects and embed CRM specific logic using SDK recommendations.

Windows service executes every minute so you need to define a process to compare time and then execute it.

Thanks for this explanation. I’m currently in the process of developing an environment where exact the same issue appears. I had it running with 4000+ waiting workflows but am a little worried about the behaviour in a real life system. Do you have some template or so for developing a service that interacts with CRM? I made a couple of interactive plugins, but having a hard time to find out how to make something that is not running interactive. Thanks for you cooperation!
Regards,
Ad.

I have reps here that have incoming email come in from Fedex.com letting them know their package was delivered. The problem is that every email is attaching automatically many times to the same contact in activity history. I looked at the events in System Jobs and it says ‘ workflow expansion task’ created by system, owned by system. We have never Ssetup a workflow with incoming emails. Any idea why this is happening and how to stop it? We use CRM 4.0 and the Outlook Ciient.
Thanks!