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20So I've been discovering the fun and joy of trying to get the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook operational for some users of our business, and its been quite a journey to even do the technical setup before we even get to users themselves - I got there in the end though. I keep coming across frustrating features though that just keep showing up over and over. I'll come up with a workaround but then it won't work in x setup and so on.
So this is both abit of a question/discussion on some things that have really bugged me trying to implement this so far. I'd be interested to know if people who've had similar issues have come up with solutions or better solutions than what I've managed to scrape together to date
For what its worth, we are using CRM on Premise version nine. I have set up server side sync that talks to an online Exchange (office 365)
- Outlook App 'dashboard' doesn't play nicely with users existing dashboards.
- Alot of our users have pinned dashboards (personal/system) that they use in their day to day when they are in CRM. What does Dynamics 365 App for Outlook do? It takes the users default and then applies that as the App view, basically entirely destroying the point of using the app in the first place. The Outlook dashboard itself is very obscure, and I was forced to make use of the XRM Toolboxes User Settings Utility to change the default dashboard of users to the Outlook one for it to 'stick'. However this means the dashboards they use in CRM they have to navigate to each time.
- Outlook App is fussy in Outlook desktop if the app is not pinned in regards to authentication. If I've successfully authenticated for the day/session it will still pop up with an authentication request if I need to reopen it. I can either try to authenticate 3 times before its happy, or just click x to ignore it and it acts as if nothing happened. I assume this is something to do with setup on my end though. This doesn't appear to happen in the web client.
- The really, really annoying 'Create contact first to avoid duplicates' popup. I think I read that its apparently by design when looking at other internet discussions on it? If you press x, it inexplicably just refreshes itself, and it disappears after about 8-9 seconds if not touched, though it sometimes seems to make itself randomly appear again even after closing itself.
- I managed to get this to be alot less irritating in Outlook desktop because one can resize the App window to be wider, and the message appears in blank real-estate at the bottom rather than block the tracking button. But in Outlook for Web, there doesn't appear to be any way to resize the app window, so the popup remains very annoying. Is there a way to resize it in Outlook for Web?
- Tracking outgoing email is a fudge and a pain for users. As far as I can work out, one either has to go back into CRM and send the message from CRM, which disjoints it from Outlook (won't show in sent email in Outlook), or one has to send the email, then go to their sent folder, then try and track it (and I've found it to be quite fussy with actually tracking these - it seems to fail on alot of them). We like being able to track outgoing email because it shows that our staff are proving they are actively engaging clients rather than doing nothing.
That's what I've discovered so far. I haven't even started digging into meetings, but that appears to be another case of it has to be sent first, then tracked after. Does anyone have fixes/better fixes for the above, or workarounds, or do these usability pains just have to be dealt with?
I just look at tools like Hubspot which our sales team are on, and it seems to do a better job of integrating with Outlook way, WAY more seamlessly than Microsofts official app does, to the point where I've integrated our Hubspot and CRM to keep our sales and client data joined up because its better to have the integration than unhappy/frustrated end users, but I really am trying to give this app a chance for some of our other users who would like Outlook working well with CRM.
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