Syncing of contacts between CRM and Outlook is a rather straightforward process once you know how, this guide will walk through the setup steps and then using filters to limit what is synced to your phone.

Getting and Configuring the CRM 2013 Outlook Client

Downloading

The outlook Client is required because it is what takes care of the syncing, it can be found at the link below on the Microsoft Download Center website.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=40344

Installing

1. Once downloaded run the executable and it will open a ‘Browse For Folder’ window. I suggest creating a new folder on the desktop and extracting into it to keep everything together.

2. Once the program has finished extracting it should start the installation automatically after a few seconds, if not go to where you extracted it to and locate the SetupClient.exe and run it to start the installation.
3. Once installation is complete you will see a screen requiring you to restart Outlook, so do a quick restart of Outlook.
4. Once Outlook has been restarted a pop-up will appear asking to configure organisation, fill in the details as below then click OK.

• Server URL – full CRM address eg. https://crm.dynamics.com/
  • Click ‘Test Connection’ and it should bring up a pop-up window. Enter your User Name and password and then click OK.
• Once it’s authenticated click the Organization drop-down and pick the name of your CRM deployment.
• Change the Display Name to something descriptive as this is the name of the section that will appear in Outlook at the bottom-left.

5. Click OK and it will start setting up the add-on.
6. Once this is done the add-on has been installed, the next job is to configure it.

Configuring

1. Open FILE at the top left of Outlook followed by CRM in the left-hand menu.
2. Click Synchronize followed by Filters.
3. A pop-up displaying any active filters should now appear, these can be modified or new ones added to limit how much is synchronized to Outlook, by default it will only sync records which have you as the Owner. (More information can be found on configuring filters in the section below titled ‘Setting Up Filters’)
4. Once done open the CRM tab found at the top of Outlook and click Synchronize with CRM.
5. CRM is now syncing with Outlook automatically and will by default record any correspondences with customers whose email is in CRM.

Setting up Filters

To get to the filters window at any point follow the Configuring section above to step 3.

Sync filters are relatively simple to set up due to the filters consisting of ‘And’ and ‘Or’ groupings Eg. “Account Status Equals Active AND Account Name contains Microsoft” will likely only return Microsoft accounts that are currently active and these filters can be extended to become quite advanced with several grouping of AND/OR logic.

1. To set up a new filter click the ‘New’ button found on the left hand side, near the top of the Filter window.
2. A new window will appear titled “New Filter”, as a start I’ll walk you through creating a filter that will sync only active contacts Owned by you to Outlook (you can have many different filters syncing different information so best to keep filters simple).
3. So first we’ll be looking for Contact type records in CRM, where it says “Look for:” in bold at the top-left you’ll want to change the drop down from Appointment to Contact.
4. Next where it says Select in underlined text, click this to select what field to filter by, as a start Select “Owner” then the field right of that will default to Equals Current User which is what we want (but this can be changed to be several different operators).
5. That will currently return all contacts owned by you whether active or deactive but we only want to sync Active contacts so another clause needs to be added to the filter.
6. Similar to step 4 fill in the next line so that it returns only active contacts. (If you’re stuck the correct field is Status and you’ll want to make it Equals Active)
7. By default CRM reads both of these as if they are grouped as an AND, which means both must be true for a contact to be synced which is what we want, but just to cover grouping select both filters by clicking the small drop-down icon left of Owner and Status and then select “Select Row” for both which will highlight them.
8. Then click “Group AND” which can be found just above the filters and you will see a block with the text AND within it appear showing that the two filters are now grouped by AND meaning both must be true.
9. When done click Save As at the top-left of the window then give it a relevant name encase it needs to be modified in future. It can also be given a small description. Once done click Save then close the New Filter Window.
10. The newly created filter can now be found in the User filters tab (displayed by default).