Recently at the Extreme 365 conference someone asked the expert panel about tracking of email. Specifically, how to make the new app for Outlook automatically track all email like you can with the legacy Outlook Client.

My first response was that it absolutely could still do that.

In the Outlook client, you can set a setting to track all email. With that setting, all incoming email will be tracked, and outgoing messages will automatically be set to track as well (which makes the “track” button automatically selected on any new message created).

In the Outlook app, the same result can be achieved by setting the user option to automatically track all incoming email. For outgoing email that I send, creating a folder-level tracking folder and an exchange rule to automatically copy all sent email to the folder will result in all sent messages being tracked. Note this does not “set regarding,” but neither does the Outlook client auto-tracking option.

So if big brother wants to track all messages sent or received by a user, this is possible with the new Outlook app.

But a different perspective is maybe we should rethink our approach to tracking email. Companies using Dynamics CRM for 5-10 years now have built up vast quantities of tracked email messages. While these messages are of some value (sometimes extreme value, when a client complains about something, and you need to see the email history), the noise to value ratio is quite high.

Also, the Outlook tracking feature is no longer a competitive advantage to Microsoft. Salesforce and other CRM vendors have added similar functionality, rendering email tracking a commodity feature.

I would encourage anybody who wants to automatically make email messages visible within Dynamics 365 to consider the auto tracking capabilities of relationship Insights. With relationship insights, emails from clients are visible to users within Dynamics 365, even if they have not been tracked in the system, and the relationship assistant can intelligently alert users to customer issues and requests.

Business relevant emails can still be tracked in the system for public consumption; however, by using relationship insights, you will add value to user experience, provide proactive recommendations that drive user actions, not annoy users, and increase user adoption.