A question was recently asked in the community forum about setting up e-mail tracking on a delegate mailbox for the CRM Outlook client. A couple of years back I put together the instructions for a client so I thought I would share the information.
Following is guidance on how to setup Outlook Delegate Access and use the CRM Outlook Client to manage the Delegate Mailbox for Outlook 2010 & 2007.
From Outlook 2010, Select File, Account Settings and Delegate Access. From Outlook 2007, select the same but from the Tools menu.
Select Add, Select User and Select the Add button
Select Ok
Give Delegate permissions on Mailbox. In Outlook 2010 the option will appear after the previous step. In Outlook 2007, select Tools, Options and the Delegates tab as needed.
Select Ok
Leave the default / recommended setting and select Ok
Follow the steps provided in the applicable link to add the new Mailbox to the delegate’s Outlook menu
In Outlook 2010 select File and Info. In Outlook 2007, select Tools and Account Settings.
Highlight the e-mail address and Select Change
Select More Settings
Select Add
Type the user’s name to add the mailbox
Select Ok, Next and Finish
I haven’t tested this yet in Outlook 2013 but I suspect it still works and the setup is similar with a few differences as there were between Office 2007 and 2010
Cheers
Donna Edwards 
Hi Donna,
Nice Article,thanks for sharing this information in very detail.
Hi Donna,
We’ve be successfully tracking emails on a delegate mailbox and it has been working with no problems. Suddenly this morning we are getting the following message…Only items in the default Microsoft OUtlook store can be promoted to MS Dynamics CRM. Any suggestions?
I suspect permissions or something changed. Try reconfiguring.
Hi Donna,
I’ve followed the steps as described, and I can’t get it working. Does this work for resource mailboxes? eg. a Mailbox that does not have a user account associated with it. Also does the exchange server need to be a certain version? eg 2010 or above?
Thanks
Exchange does not need to be 2010 but you do need to have the mailbox setup correctly and should be able to log into the mailbox using OWA. This article was written for a ‘standard’ mailbox setup.
Brilliant. We’ve been using queues for shared inboxes, but the CRM queue view leaves something to be desired wrt user friendliness and email functionality. This will make my users very happy 🙂
Hi Donna, In our organisation we have multiple shared mailboxes. Mail comes in to an address which is accessible by multiple users from Outlook as an additional mailbox on their existing account. We have about 5 such mailboxes where we’d like to track from for different user groups.
We have never had issues with one of them, i.e users can track successfully, but now we are trying to set up the others and keep getting the error that you can only track mail from the default store. The exchange guys are convinced the all these mailboxes are set up identically and everyone has the right permissions as per your details in the post. i.e. delegate access, with read access on the mailbox, etc. We’ve even tried giving full access to the mailbox. Users can send from that address and pretty much do anything from that mailbox except track in CRM.
I’ve tested this with two exchange accounts I have and it works perfectly, but then tested with another exchange account I have access to and got the same error.
So I’m somewhat grasping at straws here, but hoping it’s just a setting or config that we are missing. This is on Exchange 2010 with Outlook 2010 and Dynamics 2015 on premises.
Hi Richard, we have the same situation – were you able to fix this?
Hi Karen,
The short answer is no. We managed to get it to work successfully in some cases, but not others. It seemed completely random.
However the bigger problem is the instability of the Outlook add in, especially with older and larger mailboxes, so much so that we abandoned it mostly and wrote our own which simply creates email activities using the SDK. It doesn’t do appointments, tasks or contacts, and doesn’t have all the rich functionality you get out the box, but it doesn’t crash outlook, disable itself or track automatically against things you don’t want. It covers 95% of our requirements so are happy with it.
Hi Donna,
We are using CRM exclusively as an Incident Ticketing and tracking tool exclusively (no sales/marketing/opportunity tracking). We field service inquiries from several shared Exchange mailbox (system accounts), each of which is associated with its own CRM queue. We would like to be able to leverage the Outlook client and enable our team to track and convert emails to cases in the shared mailboxes directly from Outlook. I tried the steps above (I have admin privileges on all the mailboxes) but was not successful.
In your estimation would the above steps apply to our scenario? I have researched and asked around and have only found blog articles like yours that seem to HINT that it is possible, but it seems we are still stuck. It seems like this is pretty basic functionality and I would be shocked if we were the only team on this planet with this scenario/need.
Thanks much in advance for your consideration.
I think you are going to have a better experience by leveraging Email to Case rules. See the link below. I think attempting this functionality from Outlook, rather than within CRM is going to be quite challenging.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-US/dynamics/crm-customer-center/automatically-create-a-case-from-an-email.aspx
Hi all, I am not positive but on a lark, I wondered: Since our queues are paired with shared mailboxes that are also Domain and Mailbox accounts in AD, why not enable them as CRM users?
I did this today with one of our queues and it seems to have worked! I am able to Track items in Outlook without getting the “Default Store” error! I’m so excited that this might work for us now. Now the only issue I am having is that it takes quite a bit of time for the “Convert To” button to become available, presumably because it takes a while for CRM to sync with Outlook.
Is it too good to be true? Anyone else have this experience? Am I overlooking any risks with this implementation?
Karen,
Good day. With your statement above, are you still experiencing good results? If so, could you please assist in some direction on how to accomplish your setup as we are in a Dynamics trial and considering the switch. Our CSR’s work out of a shared mailbox within the Outlook client along with their personal mailbox and we will need to be able to be able to ~track/set regarding~ to emails. Thanks in advance for your assistance.
Since this is for a Customer Service Center, you’ll probably want to look at leverage Dynamics 365 Queues to manage the email and responses. The best approach for your configuration is going to depend on your requirements. Shared mailboxes in your scenario is most likely not going to work for your team unless the CSR are logging into Outlook with the same Outlook profile.
Hi Joe, unfortunately, the sync interval between Outlook and CRM is up to 15 minutes so we have all but abandoned using the Outlook client as a solution. I am not sure if it’s because we are using server-side sync, but I have a feeling switching to email router won’t do anything for us. We are considering building a custom Outlook client like Richard mentions above. It’s really a bummer.
Karen, you can control the sync time for the Org in Settings, System Settings. The default setting is 15 minutes but you can reduce it.
This is a very old blog article and references old technology. Things have changed considerably since this article was generated. Most are no longer on this version of Office or CRM. Server Side Sync was not available when this article was produced.
For this scenario, and if you are willing to buy the additional licenses then this is one approach that could work. Most don’t want to buy the additional licenses and require people to log in as queue users to Outlook.
Thanks for the quick reply.
We don’t mind buying the additional license it would address our process. I’m trying to avoid having the CSR’s work out of 2 different outlook applications in order to get this to work. Our shared mailbox is currently setup as a user within the Dynamics CRM but when I try to ~track~ an email within the Outlook client from the shared mailbox I get the ~Default Store~ error. Any further insight? Thanks in advance for your assistance.
There is not a perfect solution for tracking email from one Outlook mailbox for multiple people at this time. The best method for tracking this type of tracking is to setup Folder level tracking. Maybe you could configure this in a way that would work for your company.
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn946907.aspx
Hi Donna, I did reduce the sync interval in the location you specified, but the ‘Convert To’ button is still taking a long time to become available. I even performed a sync with CRM from within Outlook.
Hi Karen,
It sounds like you are having issues not related to Sync. The convert button has nothing to do with the Sync Interval. I recommend you open a ticket with Microsoft support or get the help of a good Microsoft Partner to troubleshoot your issues and provide recommendations. There could be several root causes for the issues you are experiencing.