Tip #406: The Mysteries of Sync

I received an email recently from a friend who is a brilliant genius, but even he was confounded by the apparently mysterious behavior of contact synchronization in CRM for Outlook. The following were the two mysteries, and their solutions.

1. Deleting contacts from Outlook appears to prevent them from being synchronized again.

This is by design behavior. When you delete a contact, the local sync table is updated to indicate the contact has been removed. to resolve this issue, reconfigure the Outlook client. See https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2538795 for more information.

2. Contacts remain in Outlook even after modifying the synchronization filters.

This is what I call “sync surprise.” Basically if you own or created the contact, it is not removed when I remove the client or change your sync settings. The thinking is that if you had a personal contact you tracked and then removed, it shouldn’t delete it from your outlook. This is the danger of the default “my contacts” filter if somebody owns many contacts. That’s why I always recommend people use Tanguy’s XRM Toolbox and change the default filter before setting up synchronization