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Dynamics 365 Community / Forums / Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Archived) / Adding appointment att...
Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Archived)

Adding appointment attendees (but not inviting all in Outlook)

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Posted on by awalters 3,079

We're trying to tag all activities to both the account and contact they involve, so as not to rely on the contact to account activity rollup (since this doesn't work to keep a good activity history when they leave the company and go somewhere else, etc...).  So I thought, hey, if we just go through all contacts added to an activity, and suggest/add their primary account as determined in our Connections list (and/or custom N:N relationship, still pondering that) , then that way it'll get tagged both places and all is well!  Sadly, while this seemed a simple idea I'm running into a bunch of barriers.

1. The appointment activity only has Required Attendees and Optional Attendees fields for party lists.  This means I can't have some sort of "Additional Attendees" custom field to hold these additional tagged accounts.

2. If both the account and the contact get added in the attendee fields, then they'll both get invites in Outlook (when really only one invite should be going out).

3. I figured I could just change the descriptions for Required Attendees to be Attendees (invite in Outlook), and Optional to be Attendees (track only), and then not sync the Optional Attendees field.  Sadly, that sync apparently cannot be altered.

4. If I make a custom activity for these, we lose the ability to track/send invites in Outlook completely.

5. I thought about making a custom activity that then also creates an appointment based on the accounts/contacts in the "invite in Outlook" field, but then there's a lot of duplication that has to be hidden/synced/etc...

Are there any other options here?  I keep thinking I've found a workaround, and it keeps being blocked.  :-(  I think I could theoretically make a transport rule in Outlook that keeps optional attendees from getting invites, but it's also quite a bit less than ideal since it has no visibility from the CRM admin side (so really has maintenance risks down the road).  Also, I feel like there might be weird implications if people made changes in Outlook, but I haven't pinned down quite what that would look like.  I'd love to just add a party list to the Appointment, or force a custom activity to sync to Outlook, but the former has been made completely impossible (I even tried through XML modification, just as a test), and I haven't got a clue if the latter is possible but I'm guessing not since I haven't seen any reference to anyone doing it successfully.

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  • awalters Profile Picture
    awalters 3,079 on at
    RE: Adding appointment attendees (but not inviting all in Outlook)

    Awesome.  :-)  Unfortunately doesn't work in our case, since we want accounts or contacts to be added but not invited in Outlook (and therefore the required attendees field doesn't work for us), but glad you found a solution!

  • Hafez Profile Picture
    Hafez 115 on at
    RE: Adding appointment attendees (but not inviting all in Outlook)

    Thanks for the response.  I finally got a solution for my issue by using a custom plugin that looks at a field, if field contains Team, pull members from the team and populate the Required Attendees in the CRM Appointment.

  • awalters Profile Picture
    awalters 3,079 on at
    RE: Adding appointment attendees (but not inviting all in Outlook)

    Unfortunately, we haven't yet.  We're currently just going to have to tell people to use appointments specifically only for Outlook stuff, and a custom entity we made for other types of meetings.  Which is incredibly unfortunate....I hope that ability (to tag but not invite accounts/contacts) gets added at some point.

    However, this sounds quite different from what you're trying to do (have an invited list that changes dynamically).  I highly doubt this feature is available either, as distribution groups have never worked that way in Outlook...

  • Hafez Profile Picture
    Hafez 115 on at
    RE: Adding appointment attendees (but not inviting all in Outlook)

    Hi There, did you ever find a solution?  I am trying to do something similar.  Ran into an issue with SSS Enabled.  Turns out that using SSS essentials makes the sync filters for appointments crippled, such that it is very dependent on the Organizer.  After hours of testing I have determined that using SSS the appointment in CRM must use the Required field in order to sync to Outlooks.  Ok, fine.

    The thing is the look-up are all user based.  I have a requirement to add Users of a Team. This to me is only logical.  

    - appointment is created in workflow

    - send to multiple users in CRM as Required Attendees

    - one of the users leaves or is replaced

    The Workflow has to be updated to change the User???  Not very convenient.

    So need to find a solution that will populate the Required field with Team members.

    Any ideas?  If I understand you are trying to do something similar.

  • awalters Profile Picture
    awalters 3,079 on at
    RE: Adding appointment attendees (but not inviting all in Outlook)

    To document this in case anyone else is trying....

    I found that the Outlook filters for what to sync are saved under SavedQuery or UserQuery, depending on whether they're global or not.  I found the methods for these in the SDK, and programmatically created a new user-based Outlook filter for myself for a custom activity entity.  I tested the FetchXML independently of the filter, and it returned the correct results (instances of this custom activity that I own).  I can also see the filter just fine (with all properties pointing to my custom entity, the right FetchXML, etc...) in the Sync Filter Manager in XrmToolbox.  However, when I turned tracing on in CRM for Outlook and ran a sync, I got back the error ">Crm Exception: Message: Invalid outlook filter return type code, ErrorCode: -2147220970"

    So yeah - seemed promising, but the system just refused to sync the entity if it wasn't on its expected list of entities to sync.  :-(  Not shocking, but figured it was worth a try.  Hopefully this saves someone some time in future, anyway.

  • awalters Profile Picture
    awalters 3,079 on at
    RE: Adding appointment attendees (but not inviting all in Outlook)

    Sorry - you're right, I didn't list that one.  Sadly, it's (at least from what I could see) a single-choice field only, unlike most party-list fields.  And it has the same behaviour as the attendee fields, which is that I cannot turn off the sync for it.  :-(  Thanks, though!

  • TomSmelser Profile Picture
    TomSmelser 1,570 on at
    RE: Adding appointment attendees (but not inviting all in Outlook)

    Allison, I think appointments also has an "organizer" field, which is also partylist. Not sure if that could help.  Good luck.

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