Dynamics Community Forum Thread Details

Hi, I have a tricky CRM problem I can't seem to solve.

My company uses a Dynamics CRM (2011) organisation to manage it's buisness and all users use the Outlook client to track emails and create contacts in CRM.

Now, my company's Senior Management Team (16 users) require a separate solution to allow them to manage their communications with a third party agency. They wish to use the Outlook client to track emails and appointments, and create contacts. The communications would be sensitive, and should not be exposed to the rest of the company.

All good so far, just deploy a new organisation of CRM for the management team, right?

The problem is that three of the members of the management team also have functions within the wider business, and currently use the company CRM, including via the outlook client to track emails. While you can configure the Outlook client to connect to multiple CRM organizations, you can only syncronise and track to one. This is my problem. How do I allow these three members of the management team to use CRM and track via their Outlook for both CRMs?

Has anyone got any ideas?

Solutions I've considered so far:

House the senior management Contacts within the current Company CRM, and separate them via Business Unit. All good, until you have a contact or activity tracked by one of those three 'problem' members, because their ownership of that record means that it is then exposed to the wider business.
House the senior management contacts in a separate solution other than Dynamics which can still track via Outlook (i.e. Salesforce). This was rejected by the business as too expensive.
Have two separate Dynamics CRMs, but delegate the tracking for just the three 'problem' members to an admin user, who would access their mailbox and track for them. I tried this in a test environment but it seemed fraught with problems. Kept receiving generic error messages from outlook, plus you don't get the 'tracked' icon in Outlook (for either party, the delegate or the original owner). Plus this is so open to user error it seemed impractical.
Have two separate Dynamics CRMs, but have the three 'problem' users just manually recreate their emails and appointments in CRM. Rejected by the business.
Have two separate Dynamics CRMs, and maintain two separate mailboxes for the three 'probem' users, and sync each to it's own crm. So you'd have bob.smith@company.com and bob.smith.smt@company.com. Firstly I'm not even sure if it's possible to sync two mailboxes on the same machine to two different CRMs, but anyway this has also been rejected by the company.

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