MS Outlook Connector – Unable to Track Emails?

Introduction

I came across a small “gotcha” today – I’d configured the MS Outlook Connector against a trial CRM Online instance and noticed that although I could synchronise appointments and contacts when I hit the “Track in CRM” button the email remained untracked!  This article describes the reason for this (email settings) and what the solution is.

Symptoms

The scenario is: –

1. You have the MS Outlook Connector for Dynamics CRM installed.
2. You have it referencing a CRM Online instance.
3. You can happily sync appointments and contacts in both directions.
4. The “Track in CRM” is active and when you click on it, it changes to “Untrack” as you expect.
5. But you notice the message “This email is not being tracked in CRM” – the button is lying to you!
6. You also notice that “Convert To”, “Add Connection” and “View in CRM” in the CRM toolbar in Outlook are also greyed out.

Reason

The reason is down to the email and mailbox settings in CRM.  by default when you set up a new online instance. it is configured with Server Side Sync set as the mailbox synchronisation options.  It is this which needs to be changed to the MS Outlook Connector to ensure that the mail handling is consistently

Resolution

You can find the resolution in a Microsoft Knowledge Base article.  Essentially you look at the default mail settings for the CRM instance under Settings > Email Configuration > Email Configuration Settings and set it to be “Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Outlook” for the Incoming and Outgoing Email (Appointments, Contacts and Tasks should already be set as Outlook which is why they were working).  A screenshot is shown below.  You then apply this default settings to the mailbox of all users that you wish to turn Email tracking on for.

You could also leave the default alone of course and go direct to each user’s mailbox settings via Settings > Emails Configuration > Mailboxes and set it there (screenshot below) – this would be useful is you wanted SOME of your users to be able to track their emails from Outlook but not all.

Once you have made this change, the user’s need to stop and start MS Outlook and I forced a Synchronisation refresh and all was well.