Alternatives to email templates/editor in CRM 2013?

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The email template editor in CRM 2013 is garbage. Plus any text you copy and paste then edit is not guaranteed to show up in an email the way you have it set up in the template. And with out having any access to edit the html you can not double check to make sure something is the correct font or bold or not!! And lets not start on the links and pictures. Anyone know if they are planning to fix their horrible template editor?

Does anyone have an alternative to using the templates editor? Like a 3rd party app that can be installed and takes over the role of template master? Anything?

Thanks,

streetcorner

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Nina P. 2,195 on at

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RE: Alternatives to email templates/editor in CRM 2013?

Hello streetcorner,

Thank you for using Dynamics CRM Community.

I am sorry to hear about your current experience with the CRM email template editor. I would like to provide you background information about the editor best practices to work with it and hope that this will resolve the issues you are seeing.

When composing mails or email templates in the CRM web client, we use an editor control which has limited formatting capabilities, there is a limited number of fonts and formats available. When editing, changes may not always be reflected in the editor, so that the resulting HTML may be different from what is seen on the control.

When you save a template, we store the mail body as HTML in the database which is places in resulting mails without further change, so it boils down to what you see in the editor vs. the resulting HTML in the database. These are limitations which are not uncommon with web based mail editors.

The most recommended approach for creating and formatting the e-mail templates is to do it within Microsoft Word and copy and paste the content from there. In this way, the Word formatting will be “converted” and already “pasted” in html format. The relevant part here is that no further formatting should be done within the CRM application.

Furthermore it might be beneficial to consider the opportunity to use the CRM Outlook integration to send out the emails and the much more powerful tools in Outlook to format the emails.

In case the recommended approach still results in unexpected mail formats in your particular scenario, I would suggest you to open a Support Request with CRM Technical Support at the following link www.microsoft.com/.../contact-technical-support.aspx to investigate the issue with our team and establish whether there may be a product defect. The best way to simplify the troubleshooting and repro process is to create the template in Word (including line breaks/whitespaces for data fields), copy the text in its entirety into the editor and only add the data fields without adding any whitespaces or line breaks and provide us the Word files for a local repro.

We appreciate your collaboration and feedback so that we are able to always keep improving Dynamics CRM.

Please let us know if this helps.

Regards,

Nina Peneva

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Peter Bohn on at

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RE: Alternatives to email templates/editor in CRM 2013?

Hi Nina & Streetcorner,

sorry Nina .. but this is what i hear since years from ms.

But can you tell me the reason, why ms not integrates just a clever Editor?

MS just talks around it and tries to finde workarounds, but this is, i think, an absolutely NO GO.

Why MS not just supplies a great editor - why references are made to word or outlook, or otherwiese to me incomprehensible techniques.

Sorry for my outburst, but that really really has very very very long caused me lousy mood.

Gr.Pit

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Nina P. 2,195 on at

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RE: Alternatives to email templates/editor in CRM 2013?

Hi Pit,

Thank you for your feedback. As discussed earlier, the CRM Template Editor is designed for fundamental formatting purposes and we do provide you the opportunity to create complex formatting using the Outlook client and the "Word Approach" giving you a great number of formatting functionalities and fonts. If the These methods and functionalities don’t meet the needs for your business, please provide your insight to the Microsoft development community as a product suggestion at connect.microsoft.com/dynamicssuggestions - we appreciate your feedback and thank you for using

Dynamics CRM Communities.

Nina Peneva

CRM Support Engineer

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Community Member on at

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RE: Alternatives to email templates/editor in CRM 2013?

Thank you Nina. I will try editing email templates in word first and then copy and pasting them to CRM templates.

One question though. What about pictures? Is word going to keep the online link to a picture or localize it? Which is the problem with using Outlook as the editor and then pasting the content into the CRM templates because the pictures' links do not follow.

Kirk

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RE: Alternatives to email templates/editor in CRM 2013?

Nina,

I tried editing the text in MS Word and then pasting it into the CRM template editor. After svaing the template I tested it from Outlook using the CRM plugin. And it still messes up the template, putting in extra spaces and this time adding links to things that were not linked.

Kirk

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Nina P. 2,195 on at

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RE: Alternatives to email templates/editor in CRM 2013?

Hi Kirk,

many thanks for your answers and for testing the "Word Approach". Can you please specify the version of CRM, Outlook and the browser you are using ?

Thank you for using Microsoft Dynamics CRM Communities.

Nina Peneva

Support Engineer

Microsoft Dynamics CRM

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RE: Alternatives to email templates/editor in CRM 2013?

version of CRM: Microsoft Dynamics® CRM 2013 (6.0.1.61) (DB 6.0.1.61)

version of Outlook: Microsoft Office 365 Pro Plus Version: 15.0.4569.1508

-Outlook Plug in: Microsoft Dynamics® CRM 2013 for Microsoft Office Outlook 6.0.1.61

browsers: I use all three popular browsers.

-Firefox 28.0

-Google Chrome 33.0.1750.154 m

-Internet Explorer 11.0.9600.16518

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Community Member on at

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RE: Alternatives to email templates/editor in CRM 2013?

Nina - I should also mention that our MS CRM is hosted by a third party and not MS. So going to www.microsoft.com/.../contact-technical-support.aspx , I do not have the option to post a support request but only for the subscription products we have with MS.

Kirk

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Nina P. 2,195 on at

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RE: Alternatives to email templates/editor in CRM 2013?

Hi Kirk,

thank you for providing me details to your environment. I can confirm that we have already identified and addressed a design mistake related to the copy – paste scenario you mentioned and the fix will be available with UR2. I would recommend you to test the behavior with UR2.

If you continue to encounter unexpected behavior with UR2, please contact the provider of your solution and raise a support ticket with Microsoft Support through them so that we can investigate the behavior in your particular environment.

Please let us know if this helps.

Thank you for using Microsoft Dynamics CRM Communities.

Nina Peneva

Support Engineer

Microsoft Dynamics CRM

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RE: Alternatives to email templates/editor in CRM 2013?

I have to agree with streetcorner. We use CRM and I am using the Outlook integration, and my emails come down to either just the abysmal editing and formatting functions in CRM, or double my effort by using outlook, Word and copy and paste a lot of stuff back and forth. You've got to change that. For example, a typical scenario for me would be to have a task telling me that I need to take care of an email that either came into a general email box in our company and was assigned to me. I open the task, open the person that has been set as "regarding", and then go to "completed tasks" where I find the original email. From here I can either go to "Reply" (simple, but with horrible results sometimes), or I can go back to the lead or contact, click on the email so Outlook opens a blank email, go back to CRM, copy the email, go to Outlook, paste the email, go back to CRM, copy the subject line, go to outlook, paste the subject line, compose my email, send it, go to the "Sent" folder, track the email, go to CRM close all the open windows, and update my task.

There's got to be an easier solution...

And it gets worse when I try to use templates that I have created within CRM. I insert them in the CRM email, sometimes change the font and size, eliminate the blank lines, which often are inserted, until the text looks reasonable in CRM. I then send the email out of the CRM. And then my customer replies, and I see that the email he got looks completely different from what I sent. fonts and sizes are all over the place, paragraphs run into each other or are separated by wide spaces, etc.

It is a nightmare to work with, frankly.

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