Tip #976: Dynamics 365 Outlook App conversation tracking

Now that the Outlook client is deprecated, it is important to be aware of how the automatic tracking options work with the new world of Outlook App + Server-Side Synchronization.

If you have your personal options set to track email messages in response to tracked emails in Dynamics 365, when a user tracks and sends an email to an external contact, when that contact responds to the email, the response email will be automatically tracked.

However, when the user responds to the user’s response, the email will not be automatically tracked with the Outlook app. The user will need to manually track that email for the message to be tracked.

  • User sends message to external contact and tracks the message.
  • External client responds to tracked message: This message is automatically tracked.
  • User responds to client’s message: This message is not automatically tracked.

If it is important to capture all messages in the conversation, The following are your options:

  • Only track the last message in the conversation. Do you really need all individual emails, given the last email will contain all of the other messages in the chain? You can use Outlook’s conversation cleanup feature to delete all messages in conversations except for the latest message, then track the remaining message.
  • Teach users that the emails that they send will never be automatically tracked, and that if responding to a response to a tracked message, they need to hit the track button to track the message.
  • Use folder level tracking, and create folders for important clients (up to 25) and exchange rule to move messages to those folders. This will ensure that all messages in the conversation are automatically tracked. If you want to have your sent items tracked with folder level tracking, see Outlook’s features to save copies of sent messages to other folders.

6 thoughts on “Tip #976: Dynamics 365 Outlook App conversation tracking

  1. I won’t get on a rant about this, but…

    If you change the option to track “Emails from Leads, Contacts, and Accounts”, will it track ALL the messages in a thread (assuming you track the first one you send)?

    Thanks for all your Tips!

    Lon

    • Joel Lindstrom says:

      Good point, it will also track emails from leads, contacts, and accounts that you might not want to track too.

      • Right — but it’s better than having to manually track these. We love machines to do work instead of humans because they’re so much more reliable!

        A company that has a competitive advantage with a BILLION users of Outlook “should” have figured out sometime over the last ten years how to make emails link to Contacts and Accounts and do it automatically.

        Thanks again for your contributions to the community!

        Lon

        • Joel Lindstrom says:

          and don’t overlook relationship insights. With RI, you see the email in CRM even if you haven’t tracked it yet.

  2. Joan Martin says:

    great and helpful blog to everyone.. thanks a lot for sharing

  3. George says:

    Hi All,

    I liked reading your post. I think I might have found a way to smart hack the tracking for Replies and Forwards when using the Microsoft Outlook desktop client on Windows to get it working like the old Com-Addin. I have tested this and so far it seems to work a treat. This allows the new Microsoft Dynamics 365 App on Outlook for Windows to auto track for all replies and forwards when the original email you are replying and forwarding has been tracked.

    Add the following registry key:

    [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\Preferences]
    “SendPersonalCategories”=dword:00000001

    What this effectively does is add the “Tracked in CRM” category to your replies and forwards if the email you where replying or forwarding was in itself already tracked and had the category “Tracked in CRM”

    Do some testing and you will see the same results on your end. The great thing about the old Com-Add in was the auto tracking of the forward and reply if the user tracked the inbound email to begin with. Was great as the user didn’t have to manually track the reply or forward. This hack solves the problem on Microsoft Outlook on PC.

    Hope this helps others out there who are trying to move to Dynamics 365 App and finding some functionality has been lost on Outlook on PC.

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