In our last article, we discussed the creation of bulk deletion jobs. In this article we are going to discuss the finer points of managing those bulk delete jobs.
Under the Settings area, you will find a Data Management link which, among other tasks, contains an operation for Bulk Record Deletion:
Bulk record deletion operations are actually asynchronous operations so many of the management features you would see in the System Jobs management console exist here as well.
Bulk Deletion Views
Here is the view of the default Bulk Record Deletion view:
As you can see, you have the name of the Bulk Deletion job, the status, and the number of records successfully deleted and any failures encountered.
Double-clicking the record will open it for review:
Click on the Failures in the left-hand navigation will show you a list of failures along with information about the failure itself:
Views
Several views are built into the system:
Even though you Bulk Deletion is a System Job, it does not appear that you can create your own views to add to the above list.
You can, however, add a Saved View to System Job to show specific searches involving Bulk Delete jobs.
The Toolbar
The Bulk Deletion jobs toolbar is fairly standard and includes the following functions:
- Add a new Bulk Deletion job
- Print the current view
- Export the current view to Microsoft Excel
- Perform additional actions
More Actions
Here is the list of the additional, or More, actions that can be performed on a Bulk Deletion job:
Set View as Default View
This is a standard View function which will reset the default view for the specified view.
Modify Recurrence
If can modify the recurrence of a Bulk Deletion job as long as the job is in the Waiting state.
You can’t modify jobs that have succeeded or been canceled.
As long as you have sufficient permissions, you can modify user-defined jobs or jobs created by the system.
Note: You can only change the recurrence of the job. You cannot change any of the other properties such as the search criteria, name, etc.
Cancel
Like with Workflows, you can Cancel running or waiting Bulk Deletion job.
Resume
This operation appears to execute any Paused or Waiting Bulk Deletion job immediately. If it is a recurring job, the next run date will be set to the next iteration and a log of the job’s execution will be found in the Completed jobs view.
Postpone
Allows you to postpone a waiting job until a specified date and time:
Pause
This operation actually sets the Next Run Date to 12/31/9999.
Conclusion
That is a quick overview of how to manage your Bulk Deletion jobs which is one of the most powerful data management features built into CRM 2011.
If you upgraded from CRM 4.0, you had access to this feature, but only CRM Online users had the ability to add Bulk Deletion jobs through the user interface. On-premise customers were required to create an application that created and performed the Bulk Deletion job.
