One year ago, we published our first tip, “don’t use Salesforce.” For an entire year, we have had a tip every weekday with some breaks for statutory holidays. This is a good excuse to eat cake. But really, who needs an excuse to eat cake?

Speaking of birthdays, I was recently asked about birthdays showing up on the Outlook calendar after installing CRM for Outlook. Why does this happen, and how do you make it stop?

First of all, CRM does not directly sync birthdays to your calendar. This is standard Outlook functionality (also happens in the iPhone calendar). Any contacts with birthdays show up on the calendar. By syncing contact records to Exchange, if there is a value in the birthday field, it will show up on the calendar.

If you don’t want this to happen, consider storing birthdays in a custom field on the contact. This will prevent them from synchronizing to Outlook, and they won’t show up on your calendar. CRM 2015 also adds configurable sync pipe between CRM and Exchange, which will allow you to set the birthday field not to sync to your Outlook contacts.

Or, just leave this feature on and call all of your contacts and tell them “Happy Birthday!” And have a piece of cake in their honor.

Like we just did – with exactly 255 posts we just took our first byte.