Does the Outlook Lite Plugin still mark emails as filed?

SUGGESTED

Older versions of the Lite plugin used to flag emails in Outlook as "Filed", using one of the flagging fields in Outlook (CRM Status, CRMFile, etc).  With newer versions of the plugin, this doesn't seem to be happening anymore.  I have several customers on SageCRM v2018 and v2019, and none of them get their emails flagged as filed in Outlook anymore.

Was this feature removed?  Or was this bug introduced by newer versions of Outlook?  Anyone know?

Don Grubor
Effective Solutions

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  • 0
    SUGGESTED

    Hi Don,
    It could be the version of Outlook.
    Its' still there for me, this is my demo system CRM 2018R3 with the lite plugin (20,18,0,1) on Office 2016.

    Sean

  • 0 in reply to Sean from Spire

    Thanks Sean.

    We are using the Office 365 version of Outlook, and it looks like that may be the issue.  Anyone else out there using Office 365 and seeing the "Filed to SageCRM" flag after attaching emails?

  • 0 in reply to Don Grubor

    We use O365 version. The desktop app displays the 'Filed to SageCRM' only if you add the CRM server to the trusted sites under internet explorer security settings. That tag might use an activeX add-in; the default security settings are too high for it to appear.

  • 0 in reply to SergeB

    This sounds plausible. We made changes to the "Filed" notification in 2017 R3. We ceased using the Delphi part of the plugin to set the "Filed to Sage CRM" message, and instead moved it to .NET.

    Originally, we would add a user-defined MAPI property named "CRMFile" to a message, which would then be picked up by the plugin, and would display an appropriate icon. We found that this was unreliable.

    When we moved this to .NET, we changed the mechanism so that we just add a category (based on the translation with a caption code of "CRM_FILED") to the message. We also add the globe icon by setting the message's icon property. This has the advantage of being simpler (you can also do fun things like set colour categories for filed emails). I'd guess that if something's going wrong here, it could be because the plugin (or user) isn't being allowed to set the message's category. All logging in this area should be going to the SVC log - exceptions should be tagged with "BC12" or "BC12-A".

    There could very well be an issue here between Office 365 versions of Outlook as against the standalone install. The main difference I've found between the two is that the Click-to-Run (Office 365) version does a much more thorough job of sandboxing plugins. In practical terms you'll find that the likes of registry access will be virtualised off to sub-key of the Office installation rather than going where you might expect. This in itself would have no effect on this issue, but I expect that needing to add CRM to the "Trusted Sites" zone might be a Click-to-Run thing (I haven't seen this behaviour myself, but will look into it now).

Reply
  • 0 in reply to SergeB

    This sounds plausible. We made changes to the "Filed" notification in 2017 R3. We ceased using the Delphi part of the plugin to set the "Filed to Sage CRM" message, and instead moved it to .NET.

    Originally, we would add a user-defined MAPI property named "CRMFile" to a message, which would then be picked up by the plugin, and would display an appropriate icon. We found that this was unreliable.

    When we moved this to .NET, we changed the mechanism so that we just add a category (based on the translation with a caption code of "CRM_FILED") to the message. We also add the globe icon by setting the message's icon property. This has the advantage of being simpler (you can also do fun things like set colour categories for filed emails). I'd guess that if something's going wrong here, it could be because the plugin (or user) isn't being allowed to set the message's category. All logging in this area should be going to the SVC log - exceptions should be tagged with "BC12" or "BC12-A".

    There could very well be an issue here between Office 365 versions of Outlook as against the standalone install. The main difference I've found between the two is that the Click-to-Run (Office 365) version does a much more thorough job of sandboxing plugins. In practical terms you'll find that the likes of registry access will be virtualised off to sub-key of the Office installation rather than going where you might expect. This in itself would have no effect on this issue, but I expect that needing to add CRM to the "Trusted Sites" zone might be a Click-to-Run thing (I haven't seen this behaviour myself, but will look into it now).

Children
  • 0 in reply to Robert Hurson

    Thanks Robert and Serge.

    Robert, those SVC logs you are talking about, are those on the local machine?  Are they in a particular folder or accessed through Event Viewer?  I have CRM in my trusted sites with security set to LOW and I still can't get it to flag.  Let me know where to get to those logs and I can let you know what is logging on my end.  Thanks!

  • 0 in reply to Don Grubor

    Hi,

    The logs should be on the client, in here:

    %APPDATA%\Sage\CRM\OutlookPluginForExchange\errorsdn.svcLog

    They can be read using the MS Service Trace Viewer Tool (SvcTraceViewer.exe).

    I've reproduced the behaviour as described in the initial post using a Click-to-Run copy of Outlook. I'm not seeing anything in the logs, so I reckon the call to the plugin is being suppressed. I think you might be seeing something different.

    The issue doesn't occur if the CRM website is present in either the "Intranet" or "Trusted Sites" zones, so for the moment I'd recommend adding CRM to the "Trusted Sites" zone either manually or using GPO.

    I'll continue to dig into this here, but can't guarntee we'll havea fix for 2020 R1 as we're past code freeze at this point.

    Thanks,
    Rob