Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Outlook Contact Synchronization Behavior

When planning your deployment of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 for Outlook, it is important to consider what contact records to synchronize from CRM to Microsoft Outlook contacts.  The default synchronization rule is to sync contacts owned by me to my Outlook Contacts; however, this can be changed.  Say you are a sales manager and don't have any contacts assigned to you, you may want to have all of your team's contacts synchronized with your Outlook so they show up on your Blackberry.  Or you may be a major account rep with 5,000 contacts assigned to you in CRM, and you don't want to have your Outlook Contacts overloaded with all of these contacts.  You can modify this rule to include contacts based on virtually any criteria, or you can disable it altogether so no contacts are synchronized.

To modify the synchronization settings in Outlook go to CRM --> Modify Local Data Groups and double click on the My Contacts group to edit the synchronization criteria.

Note that it is important to configure this immediately after installing and configuring the Outlook client, especially if the user has a large number of contacts assigned to him that he does not want to synchronize with Outlook Contacts.   The reason is that if you do synchronize (happens every 15 minutes by default) without changing the sync rule, all of the CRM contacts assigned to the user will be added to Outlook Contacts, and if you change the rule or deactivate the rule after the synchronization happens, the Contact records that were created will not be removed from Outlook.

To understand why this is, it is important to understand how the logic of the Outlook synchronization works. 

If I synchronize a CRM contact that is not owned by me with my Outlook and later that contact is deleted from CRM or I modify my sync rules, that contact will be removed from my Outlook Contacts.

If I synchronize a CRM contact that I own with my Outlook and later delete the contact or modify my sync rules, the contact will not be removed from my Outlook Contacts.

This is by design to prevent personal contacts from getting deleted when they are deleted from CRM.  Say I have my brother Bob as a personal contact, and I decide that I should add him to CRM since we are working with his company, so I track his contact record in CRM.  Say later Bob gets a new job, so we delete him from CRM, I don't want my personal contact record for Bob (that I tracked in CRM) to be deleted from my personal contacts.

This underscores why it is critical to plan your synchronization strategy for Outlook users, otherwise you may be required to manually clean Outlook contacts.

Thanks to Larry Lentz for helping to clarify some of this.

Comments

[Frank Sun]

Great Post!

Does Local Data Group can filter the fields you want to sync? say I don't want to sync the description filed. Is it possible to achieve that?

[Joel Lindstrom]

Frank,

The local data rules only dictate which records get synchronized with your Outlook contacts/calendar. There is no supported way to modify/extend the Outlook synchronized fields.

[Teddy Burriss]

I had all of my contacts in Outlook via the CRM 3.0 Sync tool.
When I turned on CRM 4.0 Sync it appeared to duplicate the contacts in Outlook. Within a few minutes all of the records that appeared to be duplicates disappeared and the new record stayed. The biggest problem that I can see is that all of the email address displays have been changed to inlcude the name & email address - which I previously cleaned up. How do I clean up 200 contacts so that the Email Address Display is only the name, as I had before I upgraded?

[Joel Lindstrom]

Hi Teddy,
Thanks for reading the blog.
What you are describing is Outlook behavior, not specific to CRM
I found a good blog post that talks about the various ways that Outlook displays email addresses are displayed in Outlook:
http://www.outlookpower.com/issues/issue200311/00001126001.html
According to this, it includes the name and the address if there are more than one email address associated with the contact.
I'm not aware of a way to change this behavior;however, you could probably post a message to the dynamics crm forums.

http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/crm/threads

[Randy Foo Jong Suan]

Can you point me to any information that can enable us to predefine a customized offline local data records sync criteria (e.g. saved as a configuration script or XML) in order to mass deploy the SAME setting to hundreds of CRM Outlook clients instead of manually doing this for each client? Thanks.

[NSundaresh]

Were you able to find a way to predefine customized local data store?

[Joel Lindstrom]

Randy and Nsundaresh,

The local data rules are all stored in the database in the userquery tables. The user settings (like the synch settings) are stored in the usersettings tables.
Here's a good post from CRM MVP David Jennaway on an approach to copy user data rules to to other users to automate creation of local data rules: http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/archive/2007/12/14/crm-blog-automating-local-data-query-creation.aspx
We have a tool that we have developped that we have used in several CRM implementations that presets the local data rules and user settings based on a pre-defined user profile.