Microsoft CRM Exchange Connector, email handling and lacking functionality
By Andrew Karasev
Microsoft Business
Solutions is promoting its own CRM – Microsoft CRM. Microsoft CRM is gaining
market share in small, mid-size and even large companies CRM market. As our
experience indicates it has natural success in transportation & freight
forwarding industry. Plus Microsoft CRM is welcomed by Microsoft oriented IT
people, due to all recent Microsoft technologies incorporation: Microsoft
Exchange Server, Active Directory, Microsoft SQL Server, C# and VB.Net based MS
CRM Software Development Kit (SDK).
Microsoft CRM is using
Exchange Server to enable email messaging and as usual Microsoft provides the
connector between MS CRM and Exchange. We are describing Microsoft CRM Version
1.2
- How does it work.
When you send email from CRM object (Lead, Contact or Account) – the connector
takes over, appends GUID to the message header and forwards to Microsoft
Exchange for delivery. The reason for such a primitive solution is simple –
Microsoft wants to be sure that all email systems, deployed from mail
recipient side (Lotus, Unix or Exchange) will keep GUID in the response header
(usually appending re prefix, like re:…..GUID) and on the way back to MS CRM,
connector will take all the messages with GUID in the header and will try to
match their GUID with objects GUID and append these messages to their
originating objects. Restating in direct words – if you send email from
specific contact – when recipient responds – RE message will be attached to
the contact.
- Loopholes.
Now – when you see this primitive bullet-proof mechanism – you should expect
loopholes. Imagine situation when you have your customer writing you new
email, not a response. In this case customer doesn’t obviously include GUID
into the header and this message is ignored by MS CRM-Exchange connector and
doesn’t go to the CRM. Another scenario – you user sends message from pure MS
Outlook (not from CRM or CRM client for Outlook). In this case, even if CRM
has customer email, registered in CRM – it is bypassing connector and again is
not logged in CRM. We may give you more and more scenarios when you would
expect logging to CRM and it doesn’t happen.
- Solution.
Well, you should consider fixing these problems through MS Exchange event
handler programming. These handlers are available on Exchange database and
transport level. You typically deploy MS CRM SDK and call its classes and
methods from COM+ application, serving as MS Exchange event sink. In this
case you are not limited to GUID and free to check if SENTFROM address is the
one of the Lead, Contact or Account email.
You can always have us
help you, give us a call: 1-630-961-5918 or 1-866-528-0577,
help@albaspectrum.com
Andrew Karasev is
consultant and CTO in Alba Spectrum Technologies (
http://www.albaspectrum.com ) – Microsoft Business Solutions partner,
serving clients in USA, Canada, UK, Europe, Australia, Asia, Russia, Oceania.
He is Microsoft Great Plains certified master, Great Plains Dexterity, Microsoft
CRM SDK C#.Net, Crystal Repots developer. You can reach Andrew:
akarasev@albaspectrum.com
Alba Spectrum Technologies