One of the most frequently used features of Microsoft Dynamics CRM is the Microsoft Outlook plugin that syncs up CRM activities and contact records with your Outlook or Exchange account. I’ve found that after years of use, many clients experience contacts being duplicated, appearing two or more times in Outlook. This is certainly frustrating for users! After seeing this a few times at different clients, I did some investigation on why this occurs and how to prevent it.
Alternatively, right-click on your calendar and then click 'Properties,' or click 'Calendar Properties' in the Properties group of the Folder ribbon, and then click on the 'Permissions' tab. Outlook for Mac has a number of features that make managing your calendar easy. For example, it enables you to view your calendar a number of With Outlook open and active, in the view switcher, click Calendar. Then, on the Home tab, click Week and follow these steps. On the menu bar, click.
It’s actually a very common occurrence that will be problematic for most organizations. Cause When contacts are synchronized from Microsoft Dynamics CRM to your Outlook, the Outlook plugin creates matching contact records in your Outlook account. Problems start to occur if you re-install Outlook, or migrate to an Outlook installation on a new workstation. For most, that means every 2-5 years you’re exposing yourself to a potential duplicate headache! Here’s where the duplicate contact records come from:. When the CRM for Outlook plugin synchronizes for the first time, it creates synced CRM contacts in Outlook. Outlook is installed on a new workstation or is uninstalled and re-installed on the same workstation.
The new installation of Outlook sees the contact records, but does not know anything about the synchronization, so they turn into normal Outlook contact records. When the CRM for Outlook plugin synchronizes for the first time on the new installation, it creates new synced CRM contacts in Outlook. CRM’s Duplicate Detection Rules only apply when synchronizing from Outlook to CRM and not from CRM to Outlook, so it assumes all the contacts are new. Now, Outlook has duplicate contact records for all originally synced CRM contacts: An Outlook copy and a CRM synced copy Left unchecked over the course of several years, you may end up with two, three or more copies of the same contact record! How many times have you upgraded workstations or wiped and re-installed since you’ve been synchronizing with CRM? Prevention In order to avoid creating duplicate contacts, a little advance planning is necessary.
Hi Ben, Your article is great. Thank you very much for the information. My client is facing similar problem.
He is facing an issue as mentioned below. “I basically uninstall CRM, delete the outlook profile, and rebuild from scratch.
The Outlook contacts are now syncing with CRM, but now most of the crm contacts appear 2, 3, and sometimes even 4 times” As per your article, there is a precaution which needs to be taken “Before” uninstalling the CRM Plugin/Outlook. But now the issue is, the CRM plug in already uninstalled without any precautions. He is getting the duplicate contacts. Please guide me on how to resolve the issue of Duplicate Contacts from Outlook. Also, we are seeing “Disassociate Entities” in CRM’s Audit History of a contact.
We are getting a message like below. “This record was disassociated from the Subscription record type through the contact subscription association relationship” Please guide us on this as well. Tons of Advance Thanks. Best Regards, Prashanth Mangipudi. Hi Prashanth, Unfortunately, if the CRM plugin has already been uninstalled, you’re already in a slightly tricky situation.
One way to avoid duplicates in this case is to delete the contacts out of the Outlook/Exchange account, reinstall the plugin and let them synchronize back down to Outlook/Exchange. This will result in a fresh set without duplicates. However you need to be careful not to accidentally delete contacts that might not have been tracked in CRM, like personal contacts. Doing that should resolve your issues. Best of luck! Hi Ben, This was really helpful. Our users experience duplicate contacts frequently and we’ve had trouble identifying the problem.
Occasionally we will have a user that has their Outlook profile installed on multiple machines. It sounds as though that if we install the Outlook plugin on the second machine, this would cause the contacts to duplicate, since the additional installation is going to sync both the Outlook and CRM contacts from Exchange to the new machine, and then duplicate the CRM contacts when the Outlook plugin gets installed on the new machine.
Can you think of a way we can avoid this problem, other than to not sync our contacts to our second machines? Thanks again, Anthony. Thank you so much for your post. We are having a very difficult time with this exact issue. We have CRM 2013 online and are using the Outlook 2013 client. My boss has several thousand contacts, most of which are synced to CRM. However, as you described, he is having issues with duplicates creating in Outlook and in CRM.
Originally, only contacts created in Outlook were syncing to CRM, not the other way around. Then it was the opposite. At one point, only a portion of his tracked CRM contacts were synced to Outlook, but all (with dupes) were in CRM. With some help from Microsoft, we were able to get all the contacts from CRM synced into Outlook, but now, voilawe have 3-4 duplicates of some contacts. So, in a perfect world-CRM and Outlook would get along and have the same contacts (most all of them are tracked in CRM)in both places.
Some of the hairy issues are that he has his work, home and laptops machines, a Surface and a Windows phone that need to be happy. Also, he’s running Windows 8.1 and IE 11the rollup for CRM 2013 online just came out, and he is installing it today. Question isdo we start over like you suggest and re-install Outlook after taking the steps you described? Or do we run a duplicate detection job on CRM online, delete all his Outlook contacts, and sync again? Or just throw everything out the window?;) We would SO appreciate any advice you can offer.
You’ve got some tricky situations going on! I would uninstall the plugin to remove tracking, then clean up the CRM database and re-sync down to his machine.
The real tricky part is the multiple machines, though. You can only designate one machine as the synchronizing machine with CRM. I suggest you do this on the one that is most frequently powered up and on the internet.
Typically this might be a work computer. That way it will sync as much as possible and keep the Outlook records like contacts up to date. If you keep swapping machines, that’s probably where the dupes are coming from!
Best of luck. We have another issue where someone’s outlook profile gets corrupted and we need to create a new profile. When the new profile is installed, the appointments that were previously synced to the old outlook profile will no longer sync over to the new profile.
Any new appts that are added sync over properly, but any that were scheduled before creating the new profile, will not show up. In that instance, I need to create a crm view of the users to they can manually add the appts back to their outlook calendar. Any ideas on this? Thanks so much! I did open a ticket for this in MS Connect–if you’ve got access to Connect you can view it and vote for it to be resolved here: So far, there’s been no real guidance from MS to date. As far as where the records exist and how the GUIDs are handled My theory is this: The “linkage” between an Outlook contact and a CRM record (a pointer that associates a Outlook contact with a CRM GUID) is stored only by the plugin on the local Outlook machine itself.
![Mac contacts won Mac contacts won](/uploads/1/2/5/5/125510986/875747535.png)
So it’s not stored in Exchange OR in CRM’s database. When you uninstall the Outlook plugin or switch machines, the linkage is completely lost. So neither Exchange or CRM knows the records were ever synchronized.
That’s why the dupes show up. Does that make sense? Just a theory, but I believe that’s what’s going on.
![Exporting outlook for mac contacts to excel Exporting outlook for mac contacts to excel](/uploads/1/2/5/5/125510986/798353091.jpg)
I spend a great deal of time working with CRM for Outlook and are still confused by this topic. Ben, this is a useful article, however based on some extensive testing i’m of the opinion that if you deactivate the Contact filter and then synchronise with CRM, previously synced Contact records will not disappear from Outlook BUT the link to CRM will be broken. Similarly, if you change a CRM record that is synced with Outlook to no longer meet the filter criteria, the record will remain in Outlook and the link will be broken leaving a stand-alone record in Outlook. I’m not sure if this is other people’s understanding? I have to say that from my testing the behavior is completely different than you describe. Having CRM 2011 UR14 when you simply replace machine (turn off old one and give new one with CRM installed) nothing happens, contacts are same as before, just one. Instead, if you deactivate Contacts filter and do a Sync, the contacts wont disappear but change to standard Exchange contacts.
I have only managed to get contacts duplicated when I have uninstalled/installed the addon on the same machine and then synced. I will open standard support case with MS about this.
While you may have sorted your Contacts folder the way you want it to, the Address Book in Outlook has its own sorting mechanism. The separation can be quite confusing some times and the options which control the sorting order aren’t all located in the same location either, which can make things even more confusing. This guide explains how you can set your preferred default and how to get uniformity in your Address Book. Outlook defaults There are various options in Outlook which control how a contact’s name is being shown.
The defaults are as follows:. Address Book: First Last. Contacts Folder – File As: Last, First. Contacts Folder – Full Name: First (Middle) Last Address Book The Address Book is the dialog which you get when you press the Address Book icon on the Ribbon or Toolbar, press on the To, CC or BCC button while composing a message or use the keyboard shortcut CTRL+SHIFT+B. Aside from sorting it “First Last”, you can also set it to use the “File As” of a contact. You can change this in the following way:.
Outlook 2007 Tools- Account Settings- tab Address Books- double click on: Outlook Address Book. Outlook 2010, Outlook 2013 and Outlook 2016 File- Account Settings- Account Settings- tab Address Books- double click on: Outlook Address Book When you’ve changed the “Show names by” option in the Outlook Address Book, you might need to restart Outlook before the change will take affect. Sorting options of the Outlook Address Book.
Contacts Folder – File As The File As setting controls how a contact is stored and initially sorted. Granted, it is somewhat meaningless as the Contacts folder can be sorted by any other field as well. This field does hold merit though when you for instance prefer to file family and close friends only by their first name, business contacts by Company, Last, First and all other contacts Last, First. No other sorting mechanism would allow for this system. As it is basically a free-form field for each contact item and its default is set to Last, First, it is a great alternative way to sort your Address Book to your liking or simply switch your Address Book sorting order from First Last to Last, First. To change the default setting for the File As field use:.
Outlook 2007 Tools- Options- tab Preferences- button Contact Options- option: Default “File As” order. Outlook 2010 File- Options- Contacts- option: Default “File As” order.
Outlook 2013 and Outlook 2016 File- Options- People- option: Default “File As” order The “File As” setting is only a default format suggestion. You are free to change the field for each contact or even freely type something else (like a nickname) in the field. Contacts Folder – Full Name The Full Name setting doesn’t play a role in the sorting order for the Outlook Address Book.
It is however used as a display field for your Contacts folder and can also be used in a. As the default for this field is the reverse of the “File As” setting, it allows you to quickly sort your Contacts folder by both First Last and Last, First. To change the default setting for the Full Name field use:. Outlook 2007 Tools- Options- tab Preferences- button Contact Options- option: Default “Full Name” order.
Outlook 2010 File- Options- Contacts- option: Default “Full Name” order. Outlook 2013 and Outlook 2016 File- Options- People- option: Default “Full Name” order Default Names and Filing options for Contacts. Updating the “File As” field for existing contacts Changing the default File As and Full Name settings for your Contacts folder doesn’t automatically update these fields for your existing contacts. This also wouldn’t make much sense since it is an individual field for each contact which you save. As mentioned previously, you might want to file your contact items for your friends and family different from the ones for your business contacts.
To still be able to update your contacts in bulk, for instance when you want a different default altogether, you can use the following script or one of the add-ins:. (script). (discount code: BH93RF24 ).
The add-in allows you to change the File As field of all your Contacts at once and with it, affect their sorting order in your Outlook Address Book.