Hi Everyone,
We are slowly moving away from the Dynamics 365 Outlook client to the new Dynamics 365 App for Outlook.
One of the things we find that really irritates our users with the new app is that there is no immediate onscreen way of seeing what you have tracked and what you have not. This is especially so for the users that send and receive hundreds of emails are day.
It's very annoying to have to check each email and click the Dynamics 365 App button to see it's tracking status.
I have found a supported way which uses Conditional Formatting in Outlook to change the color of an email once it's been tracked in CRM to allow users to quickly see when it's been tracked in CRM without having to go through a whole circus of processes.
Remember this is a workaround (By work around I mean it's better than the nothing we are given at the moment)
In Outlook you can add a column named "crmLinkState" (without quotes). To do this, go to the View tab, click View Settings button, click Columns , then click New Column. Type crmLinkState as the name. The column Type should be Number. Please also note that "crmLinkState" is case sensitive. The values which now appear in your new column mean the following:
blank - never tracked
0 - means untracked, i.e. it was tracked at some point but not currently
1 - track pending
2 - currently tracked
Now you have the new column in Outlook you can use Conditional Formatting in your View to altar the way a tracked email looks. What I have done is for any email which contains a crmLinkState = 2 than change the font colour to "Teal". This way my regular untracked emails are black and my tracked emails are coloured Teal.
Hopefully this helps anyone else out there who is scratching their head as much as I am.
Moving forward ideally I would like to see all the functionality of the Dynamics 365 Outook Client rolled into the App like multi selecting items to Track and also having it so the app automatically tracks my outgoing replies if they where tracked to begin with. For us automatically tracking the outbound reply is equally as important as tracking the inbound reply as sometimes its the sender who has the last words!
For more details on the "crmLinkState" field in Outlook see the following great read:
https://community.dynamics.com/crm/b/dynamicscrmsupportblog/archive/2013/01/22/crm-for-outlook-client-synchronization-blog-series-part-2-what-happens-when-you-track-an-item-in-outlook