Dynamics CRM 2011 Outlook client how to track items on multiple mailboxes stores

I came across this a few times and I don't think it's widely documented, if you want someone to track emails, contacts or other items on other users mailbox, this is possible with CRM client, you can make this possible with two steps and no permissions in AD are needed:

You would normally receive the below error when trying to track an item on other users mailbox:



To make tracking items on other users mailbox possible, you need to access the users items/mailbox, you do this by asking the user to:

1. First delegate control over the mailbox via the delegate permissions
2. Secondly by giving you folder permissions so you can expand the items in your Outlook.
3. Add the user's mailbox to Outlook and you ready to track other users emails, contacts etc..

 Note: The created record owner will be the original users mailbox but the 'Created By' will match the actual person that tracked the record.

Delegate Access
In Outlook go to File > Account Settings > Delegate Access

 





















Search the user in the Address Book > Click Add > and Ok:

Assign the Delegate Permissions:

Mailbox Folder Permissions
From the folders view, Right-click the Mailbox and select Folder permissions:

 










On the Folder permissions screen you don't have to give Owner permissions you can customize it, what is important is that the user gets permissions to read:

Now Add the user's Mailbox to your Outlook
On the Folder Permission screenshot above, on the General Tab > click Advanced and you see the below Screenshot.

Use the Add button to Add the Users mailbox by typing the User's Name and click OK, and the mailbox is added to your navigation folders.


Conclusion
And this should be enough to let you track items other users mailboxes. Hope this was useful and happy tracking. :)

Dynamics CRM 2011 Outlook client gotchas

I have recently come across a few interesting issues with dynamics CRM Outlook client which I would like to share, I don't think they are also widely documented.

Dynamics CRM 2011 Outlook client 'Sign-In' and 'Trying to Connect'
The user couldn't open CRM within Outlook despite all working perfectly, I mean, Configuration wizard completes successful, fiddler shows all connections made successful.

Another interesting behaviour was that every time I removed the configuration from the configuration wizard leaving it with no organization configured and returned to Outlook it would start configuring automatically.

Clicking on the CRM tab, was all greyed out and clicking on the CRM 2011 Button would show a page saying sign-in when you click sign-in would say trying to connect and would do nothing.

This was obviously something related with the user Outlook profile, so the resolution was to start outlook with the following swtich:

Outlook.exe /resetfolders



Dynamics CRM 2011 Outlook client out-of-memory errors
It seems it's no longer servers that are moving away from 32bits architecture; I have found that Outlook and even IE 32bits are struggling to keep the pace, below are a few screenshots from both IE and Outlook throwing errors after unable to allocate more memory to work with Dynamics CRM. The solution for this is to use 64bits version of Outlook and Internet Explorer.

Dynamics CRM 2011 Outlook client configuration wizard does not open
Upgrading the Outlook plugin from CRM 4 to CRM 2011 some times causes an odd behaviour where the configuration wizard runs on the background (only visible under processes on task manager) and then closes itself.

I found that the previous registry key from CRM 4 is not deleted from the registry and is the cause of the problem, delete the MSCRMClient folder under:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MSCRMClient

and this should resolve the problem.

Rollup Installation Cannot load Counter Name data because an invalid index '' was read from the registry

This is related with a performance counter corrupted on the user machine. To fix the problem run the following commands on the command prompt:

C:\lodctr /r
C:\lodctr /e:CRM Client



Please leave feedback and if you have any gotchas like this please let me know, hope this helps someone.