Auto Synch Address Book into Outlook from CRM 4.0

One of the great features that CRM 4.0 posseses is the intergration to Outlook. However, setting up this quality integration of CRM 4.0 to Outlook (2007 in my case) isn’t really that apparent. For instance, the ability to automatically synch all CRM leads, contacts and accounts in your Outlook address book. To achieve this you have to do a few things…..

• Set up your CRM options to do so.
Go into Outlook, pull down menu ‘CRM’, then ‘Options’ (this will bring up your personal options in CRM (not Outlook!).
Go into the ‘Address Book’ tab
Check ‘Match all contacts in Microsoft Dynamics CRM’ under Contacts.
Check ‘Match all items in Microsoft Dynamics CRM’ under Contacts.

Now to the best of my knowledge (which is limited I admit), this sets up CRM to look to synch all contacts. In order for Outlook to actually perform the synch, you must go into your Outlook settings (which is provided by a seperate CRM Diagnostics tool) and enable the synch process. Kinda sounds like Microsoft right hand hasn’t met it’s left hand quite yet……

• Set up your Outlooks options to enable the synch.
Go to ‘Start Menu’, ‘All Programs’, ‘Microsoft CRM 4.0′, ‘Diagnostics’.
Click the ‘Support Mode’ (default tab that is brought up should be ‘Synchronization troubleshooting’)
Check ‘Address Book Synchronization’.
Check ‘Outlook Synchronization’.

This will now synch up your Outlook address book with your CRM Leads, Contacts & Accounts. Oh, you might want to close out of Outlook for the synch to take place.

For more info on the diagnostic tool and it’s functions, see the informative post about it at the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Team Blog

Happy CRM’ing…..

Customizing Marketing List View in Microsoft CRM 4.0

Upon trying to customize the view of the “Marketing List Members” in the Marketing List entity, I hit a road block (typical in CRM 4.0 I have come to realize..). My first instinct was to go under the Contact entity, look for the associated view and modify the view from there. Much to my surpirse, the view didn’t match what I was seeing in the Marketing List. Hmm….

After a short while on Google, I found that the Marketing List Members does not use a view that is available from the Contact entity. Of course it doesn’t! It uses a built in view call “All Members”. In order to modify this, you must use the Advance Find feature, pull up the “All Members” view and modify it there. See the details at Customizing Marketing List from the Microsoft CRM Team Blog site.

Good Luck!!