Microsoft Dynamics CRM Bulk Delete Wizard

Using the "Bulk Delete" feature in CRM 2011

In 4.0, if you wanted to delete a large number of records (in a supported manner), you could either select them in the view of 250 at a time and delete them page by page, or use a custom application or utility to leverage the bulk delete features that were built into CRM, but not visible through the user interface.  CRM 2011 changed that for the better.

How to launch a Bulk Delete Job

There are a number of ways to initiate a bulk delete job, but the easiest way in my opinion, is to start with an advanced find query that returns *only* the records you want to delete.

From the Results page, save the view, then open the “More Actions” Menu and choose “Bulk Delete” to start the Bulk Delete Wizard

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Next Either open the Saved Query you just created, or re-create it here. Be sure it returns *only* the records you want to delete:

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You can double-check by clicking on the “Preview Records” button – it will return a view of the records that will be deleted by this Job.

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If you’re good with the results, Click “Next” to schedule the job.

In this case, I only want to run the job once, but I could schedule it to run every X number of days, which is potentially useful if you’re logging some events, but do not need to maintain history beyond a certain point, or if you want to periodically (and permanently) remove records that become invalid or stale over time.

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And finally confirm. (Last chance to back out.)

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Once submitted you can review the progress in the ‘System Jobs’ List – Once the job is complete, the Status Reason will show as “Succeeded”

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Good luck – and be careful what that query returns – there’s no “undo” on a bulk delete. http://blog.customereffective.com/.a/6a00e54fb34b6f88330163061d893f970d-pi