How long will a workflow stay in a Status Reason of "Waiting" before it times out?

Question

I'm wondering how long a Dynamics CRM workflow will stay in a Status Reason of "Waiting" before it times out/gets cancelled automatically?

I have a workflow for "Renewal" Opportunities with the following step: "Wait until Today's date >= 3 months before Renewal Date." Then, the record is updated. I'm worried that if the workflow has a status of "Waiting" for too long, it will cancel automatically. Will this be an issue? If yes, what is a better way to handle "Renewal Opportunities", so the Opportunity Name gets updated with the word "Renewal" 3 months before the date in the "Renewal Date" field?

Thanks!

Answer 1

It will wait indefinitely. But... as someone who has written products that rely on waiting workflows, I can say that there can be issues. Perhaps most prominent is the risk of the workflow getting cancelled before its trigger date - not "automatically" but by a user or user-defined process.

One client has routines that cancel waiting workflows on a regular basis. That broke everything all the time until we moved their scheduling out of workflows to an online scheduler.

In general it's fine to rely on waiting workflows that are scheduled months out, but it's also prudent to have a mechanism to confirm that they're operating and recover when they're not.

Answer 2

Aron did a good job of tackling the first part of your question.

If yes, what is a better way to handle "Renewal Opportunities", so the Opportunity Name gets updated with the word "Renewal" 3 months before the date in the "Renewal Date" field?

1) Create a procedure:
Often a manual procedure is more cost effective and reliable than developing automation.
- Create an Opportunities Pending Renewal view which shows all opportunities where the Renewal date is within X days of today.
- Create a Renew Opportunity workflow
- Put in place a process where by a user regularly (once a month/ once a week?) opens this view and runs the Renew Opportunity workflow.

This is a good option if the renewal does not need to occur on an exact date.

2) Have an external application launch the workflows:
You could write a lightweight scheduled application to carry out this operation. If you take this route, I recommend keeping as much of the configuration in CRM as possible by having the application execute over the results of a CRM view and kick off workflows to carry out the renewal action. That way when your business decides to change their rules (e.g. different renewal period) you just update the view criteria or workflow.

This is a good option if you have in-house dev power and if there are many such workflows that you can leverage your scheduled application to handle.

3) Have a plugin launch the workflows:
This is my personal preference. Same as Option 2 except rather than using a scheduled console application you let CRM host and schedule the job. Create a custom scheduled task entity, and set up a workflow which waits for some period (e.g. 24 hours) then creates a scheduled task record. Add plugin logic which fires on-create of scheduled task records, which carries out the same actions from option 2.

This is better than #2 for several reasons:
- Does not require external hosting, no integration concerns
- The job can be triggered manually simply by creating a scheduled task record
- You can add result logging to the scheduled task record

Other thoughts:
I won't pass judgement on whether the above options are "better" than waiting workflows, they all have different strengths and weaknesses. The Async service is much more reliable that it was historically, but I personally still try to avoid using workflow which wait for extended periods of time, primarily for system complexity and performance reasons. If you need automation and don't have in-house developers, then your best option probably is to set up waiting workflows.