Workflow Help: Send an email when an opportunity's related task has been completed

On the basis that when BPM creates the Task you can populate the Task Fields, you can populate a Task Field with specific criteria (even use a standard unique Description for these tasks) and then use that as the criteria in the Task Module field Evaluation to trigger the next step.

Great. I do have a standard pre-defined description for these tasks, so that's perfect.

So I'd update the criteria on Message Event #1 to be Sales Stage is "Closed Won" AND Description is ".....", correct?

Thanks for your help, Greg!

I'm fairly sure you will only need the criteria on Message Event 1 to be the Task Description as the process wouldn't have got to that point unless the Opp was already Won.

That is unless you did have the possibility that the Task Description could be used in some other circumstance as well in which case you could really lock the process down by putting both conditions in anyway as you have said.

Just to be clear, the Message Event #1 criteria also has Task Status = Completed, right?

I just wanted to mention that if you use an editable field (such as Description is OOTB), it is always possible that your special description value won't match because someone else has updated it while you're waiting for the task to be completed. If that's a concern, it would be safer to make your criteria on a field that users can't edit, such as a role-restricted field or one that is hidden from views.

I also had the same idea as Greg, but organized slightly differently. I was envisioning splitting the process definition into two process definitions:

1. When an opportunity moves to Closed Won, create a task and set the Description field to your special value.
2. When a task's status changes to Completed and its Description field = your special value, send an email.

They seem like they could be considered two distinct flows, and a possible benefit of splitting them is that you won't have processes sitting in progress while waiting for the task to be completed, and will instead trigger a simple process that is immediately completed when the conditions are met.

Just wanted to throw that out there! I'm not sure if there are any performance implications or really any difference between the combined flow and the separated flows, but if anyone has insight on that, I'd love to hear. Maybe a combined flow is better for easier understanding tracking of the overall progress through the states. This is sort of related to the topic being discussed in BPM Best Practice for Start Points - One complex, or multiple simple? What is your opinion? if anyone is interested.

Thanks.

-Brenda

That's true. I don't think we are utilizing the Task Description elsewhere, so the Closed Won criteria would be unnecessary. Thank you, Greg.

Thanks for the note, Brenda! 

You are correct, the Message Event #1 criteria has has Task Status = Completed. And you bring up a good point about the potential for a user to update the description. I'll have to think through that.

And I was also going back and forth about breaking the workflow into multiple flows, but I decided I'd prefer to have the whole flow together for easier visualization. It's just taking me a few tries to get it right since this is one of the first workflows I've built out!