Dynamics CRM synchronisation to Outlook

The Outlook client for Dynamics CRM is a special animal. As it fits the "look and feel" of Outlook it is the obvious choice for our employees. If you use it, you know that it is not the most smooth of experiences. Especially promotion of items to CRM can be a pain, along with mail merges.

In terms of installation you have two choices, with or without offline access, which come with substantial resource hunger, so I read. We don't need that functionality, so I can't judge from my own experience.

In both ways, every user can choose which items are synched by accessing "CRM" and "Options" in Outlook, then moving on to the "Synchronisation" tab. Now, unchecking one of these boxes means nothing is synched anymore. So no contacts, no tasks etc.

To define this in more detail (e.g. contacts from Eastern Sales region), you can define a filter by opening "CRM" and "Modify local data groups". In the installation without offline access only Contact synchronisation settings can be adapted. By default Outlook synchronises your active contacts with the address book if you check the synchronisation with contacts checkbox. You can change this filter to synch only contacts from a certain Account, country and so on.

If you want to do the same for also for other entities, you need the offline access installation. This should also allow you to synch only open tasks, to make an example someone was asking on a Dynamics CRM newsgroup.

I got pointers to this on the Customer Effective blog (Post A and Post B), which also points out how to change the sync settings for all users.