Snapshot Survey: Outlook Integration

This is the first of a series of snapshot surveys about features within Sage CRM.  Sage wants to better understand how customers use each feature and how we can update the product to provide more benefits to our customers' businesses.
Please answer the questions below and use the response area to provide additional commentary.
Outlook Integration
This survey is about how customers use the Outlook Plugins provided by Sage CRM.
Please comment below about the feature(s) of the Outlook Plugin you find most useful.
Parents
  • We were tasked by a customer a year ago to build an in-product email import. All users had Chromebooks and accessed their O365 email within the web experience. Each user was required to individually authenticate and was then able to import emails from their Inbox/Sent Items/Archived/Deleted folders.  We also built a background sync process, that could automatically file future responses to that thread.

    The framework allowed us to easily replicate with G-Suite for another client. 
    Let's hope this survey is because Sage are finally going to invest some development resource in this area.

Reply
  • We were tasked by a customer a year ago to build an in-product email import. All users had Chromebooks and accessed their O365 email within the web experience. Each user was required to individually authenticate and was then able to import emails from their Inbox/Sent Items/Archived/Deleted folders.  We also built a background sync process, that could automatically file future responses to that thread.

    The framework allowed us to easily replicate with G-Suite for another client. 
    Let's hope this survey is because Sage are finally going to invest some development resource in this area.

Children
  • in reply to Sean from Spire

    IMO this looks like a neat solution and actually is exactly what is needed in core product rather than trying to interface into Outlook. This way control is completely kept within Sage CRM and so can be managed much easier.

  • in reply to Sean from Spire

    Sean, very slick solution!  I agree with the others that supporting the Plugin has been a high-maintenance effort since forever.  And I know this survey is about the Plugin, but troubleshooting server-side, Exchange-CRM sync issues has been no less problematic.  One recommendation that applies to all software (in all universes...), is to provide the user with helpful, plain-English explanations of precisely what went wrong and with links to KB article(s) on how to resolve.  If there were an alert feature such that the CRM Admin gets an email that explains when and why the sync fails - with KB links - that would be a giant leap forward for mankind.  (smile)

  • in reply to Sean from Spire

    I like the look of that. Keeping the entire thing within CRM rather than a lot of faffing about with Outlook and the plugin headache that goes with it. Is this a module that you can deploy anywhere or is this customer specific?

  • in reply to Vega

    We did script it into a generic Sage CRM component. Apart from our own custom tables to handle the configuration elements, everything else used vanilla Communication and Comm_Link entities and fields. 

    We only had 1 person working on it in-between other projects. As we had already built the Sage CRM and MS Teams integration, we are able to reuse authentication/token code from that. I reckon it was functional within 3 weeks from concept. Hopefully the Sage Dev's can add something similar to the core offering for everyone.