Adventures of a Vagabond

I’ve been getting a lot of e-mail and questions around how you can use Forward Mailboxes on CRM 4.0, so here’s a video that should help clear things up.

Depending on your deployment, there’s essentially four reasons why you might choose to use a Forward Mailbox over individual mailbox monitoring (as in the other two videos).

1. One set of credentials for a single mailbox.
2. Forwarding e-mails to the forward mailbox is accomplished by inbox forwarding rules in Exchange, which can be customized by the user.
3. Efficiency, as we are polling one mailbox instead of many.
4. Reliability, as you are not as susceptible to things like password changes/expiration.

Enjoy!
CRM 4.0 E-mail Router with a Forward Mailbox

(previous: e-mail router with pop3 or individual exchange mailbox)

As many of you know, I’m the Program Manager in charge of the Outlook Client. One of the most common asks that I see is a tool to “push out” offline data filters to individual clients. The lack of a tool was pretty painful for our administrators out there.

In CRM 3.0, you could modify a user’s offline data filters centrally, but it pretty much required you to hack the database. Possible, but entirely unsupported (naturally!).

In CRM 4.0 we still haven’t shipped a tool, but we’ve opened up the SDK sufficiently enough that you can accomplish this programatically. Clint Warriner of our support team has just published a tool he wrote to administer offline data filters, which is installed via MSI.

Updated: Clint tells me it’s not actually an MSI install, but a command-line app that does the work.

In our last episode, we hooked up the CRM 4.0 E-mail Router to a POP3 mailbox on Gmail, then pushed that mail into a CRM queue. This is a stelar feature of CRM 4.0 that allows you to integrate with e-mail solutions outside of the Microsoft stack.

Today, I explore another one of the new features of CRM 4.0: the ability to connect directly to an individual’s Exchange mailbox. This means that you don’t have to deal with forward mailboxes and rule deployment to do e-mail integration. It also means you won’t have to deal with the hassle of coordinating multiple IT departments and having them sign off on your architecture.

I’ve heard some people refer to this feature as RPC-over-HTTP connectivity, vis-a-vis Outlook. In actuality we are using the DAV protocol to retrieve mail (hence why we only support Exchange 2003 and 2007).

Enjoy!

http://video.mikelu.org/emailrouterexchange/emailrouterexchange.html

With CRM 4.0 off and running now, I’ve been seeing a lot of questions on how to get the E-mail Router to work with POP3 mail access. I’ve recorded a video of how you can take a Gmail mailbox and hook it up to a Queue inside of CRM via the E-mail Router.

Enjoy! Next video…using the E-mail Router with an individual Exchange mailbox!

http://video.mikelu.org/emailrouterpop3/emailrouterpop3.html