I'm reviewing email setup in CRM right now, and trying to plan how we're going to do this integration. As background, we're implementing CRM 2015 on-prem, and our email is O365.
We have basically two scenarios:
- Regular, individual user mailboxes. These mailboxes and users would correspond 1-to-1 with users in CRM. They would like to have the ability to sync contacts, tasks, and emails with CRM (both not necessarily every email goes in automatically.) From what I understand, CRM for Outlook is the exact fit for this use case...except for our handful of Mac users, but...not much I can do about that at the current time. They knew what they were getting into when they chose Macs. :-)
- Shared mailboxes - and by this I mean mailboxes literally configured as Shared in O365 - where a team of people is given access. For example, our support @<our domain> email address. The team of people that typically respond to support inquiries all have delegate privileges on this shared mailbox. This mailbox does not have any tasks, contacts, etc... of its own, only emails. We'd like these emails to go into CRM automatically. It seems to me from what I've read that this is where the Email Router could come into play.
My questions are:
- Are my understandings above correct? (That CRM for Outlook is the best fit for the individual users, and Email Router for the support team type of scenario) Note: we can't use Server-side, as we're in a hybrid environment.
- Can we have both CRM for Outlook and the Router successfully in play at the same time? I'm concerned because it's created a mailbox for my CRM user automatically, and won't let me delete it. I've set everything under it to CRM for Outlook, but I keep getting alerts that I should change that to Server-side or Email Router because the mailbox can't send. (I've tried both Exchange and POP3 server profiles and get the same errors.)
- Can shared mailboxes be properly setup with the Email Router? If so, what credentials should I be using? So far, the only way I've been able to get this to work is by setting up a POP3/SMTP server profile, then associating this mailbox to it (which seems fair) - however, it will only let me choose the "credentials specified by a user or queue" option for authentication, and then I have to hard code credentials into the mailbox. But I want only the people who have permissions for this box to be able to use it, and to do so using their Windows Authentication. Failing that, I still don't want to hard code any specific user's credentials in, in case those change, and since it's a shared mailbox it doesn't have its own credentials.