I hope someone can help me with this problem I'm having to do with CRM.
We have a problem whereby lots (in fact millions) of CRM Contacts, oftentimes the same one, are being created for no reason.
We are using Microsoft Dynamics 365 v8.2.2.112. We are running on-premises and not in the cloud.
This problem started happening when we upgraded to CRM v8.2 in January this year. I know this by mapping the number of Contacts being created by date. When 8.2 was installed, the number of Contacts created sky-rocketed.
We are finding that the same Contact is being created many many times, by the same CRM user (i.e. with the same "Owner"/"Created By" value). And this happens for most of our CRM users. The end result is that we have millions of duplicate CRM Contacts.
If you do a CRM "Advanced Find" of Contacts, ordering by "Created On" descending, you can see the Contacts being created (every 5 minutes or so). I can see no reason why they are being created.
We have several CRM users who seem to be particularly prolific generators of Contacts. If I do a query, I can see that there are about 20 users who are the owners of nearly 19 million Contacts. And most of them are just the exact same Contact repeated over and over again. And this applies to multiple Contacts. In reality these users will have created a few (like a dozen or so) Contacts in CRM, but definitely not hundreds and thousands of the same person over and over, for multiple Contacts.
Lots of people here think that the issue is due to some kind of CRM/Outlook synchronisation issue. We use the CRM Outlook Plugin (v8.2.3.8) extensively. We think that there is some kind of bug that occurs when Syncing peoples' Outlook contacts with their CRM Contacts. Is anyone aware of any bugs in this arena?
We don't want to turn off Exchange/Outlook syncing because people need it to do their jobs. Our users have to be able to sync Activities, Appointment and Contacts. That's how they use CRM.
I'm aware of the ability to turn off a user's Outlook Synchronisation filters. But if I do this for a user, it doesn't stop them generating all these repeated Contacts. So it doesn't fix the problem. NB I don't want to do this anyway (as it's how we use CRM).
Also, I know that in a user's "Email" settings, I can turn off the "Automatically create records in Microsoft Dynamics 365 -> Create Contacts" to "No". This makes no difference and the multiple Contacts continue to be created by the user, despite having set this "No".
By the way, we have customised CRM by creating plugins (using C#). However, I'm sure that Contacts aren't being created in code anywhere (this was the first thing I checked). I'm sure that when "On Created" is fired on the Contact entity, that no additional Contacts are being created (as this would create a loop). So I'm sure that's NOT the problem.
Does anybody have any idea of what's causing this problem? How do we fix this?
