Workflow 2.0 Tasks Not Escalating

Microsoft Dynamics GPI probably spent longer pondering over this one than I should have done.

We created a new Payables Transaction approval workflow for a client last week and during UAT they reported that tasks were not escalating when they went overdue.

I verified the workflow and did some testing and was able to confirm that tasks were not escalating correctly.

This was not something I had seen before so I spent a little time doing other things to divert my mind before the realisation struck that a scheduled process has to be checking for tasks to escalate. So off to SQL Server Agent I went.

Or at least tried to. The client does not have SQL Server Agent installed; rather they use an alternate third party tool (I don’t know why).

We passed details of the jobs through to them which are usually created in SQL Server Agent (Scan For Overdue Workflow Tasks For All Companies and Scan For Invalid AD Users and Expired Delegations For All Companies) so that they could create them in the third party tool.

The additional thought which occurred is that Dynamics GP is supported on Microsoft SQL Server Express which does not contain SQL Server Agent, so users on this SQL Server platform cannot use escalations in Workflow 2.0 (unless they use a third party equivalent of SQL Server Agent).