A very popular feature in Exchange Online is shared mailboxes. A shared mailbox is a mailbox that multiple users can open to read and send e-mail message. It does not require a license if it doesn’t exceed 5 GB in size, and you are free to create as many shared mailboxes as you like. It can provide a generic e-mail address, such as info@contoso.com or sales@contoso.com, which customers can use to inquire about your company. It allows multiple users to monitor and reply to e-mail sent to an e-mail address, such as a help desk.
In an Outlook Web App-only setup it may feel somewhat cumbersome to switch between your own Inbox and your shared mailboxes - and if responding to mails in a shared mailbox is a shared responsibility of your team, it’s important to know if one of your team members already is working on one of the mails in the mailbox, before you take action on that same mail.
To ease the job of working with mails in a shared mailbox AND to keep track of which colleague is working on which mails you can consider adding CRM Online’s mail-enabled queues to the mix.
If you hook a mail-enabled queue into your shared mailbox you'll be able access the shared mailbox' mails from the CRM Online queue, and mark one or more mails in the queue as mails you are working on.
If you open a queue item (holding one of the mails from the shared mailbox) you can even convert it to a Lead, an Opportunity, a Case and take lots of other actions on it to ensure a structured handling of the mail.
The components
To bridge the shared mailbox in Exchange Online and the email enabled queue in CRM Online in terms of emails, you'll need an email router (a piece of software sitting on a computer). So the components in the above setup would be:
1. Setting up a shared mailbox in Exchange Online
To setup a shared mailbox you can either use PowerShell or a graphical tool. In either case you'll first need to create a security group to hold the users who'll access the shared mailbox.
Go to Exchange Online Administration, select Manage My Organization -> Users & Groups -> Distribution Groups. Fill out the required information and select the "Make this group a security group" check box.
To enable members of the security group to open the shared mailbox, read e-mail, and use the calendar, you'll need to provide the parameter FullAccess to the PowerShell command Add-MailboxPermission. To enable members of the security group to send e-mail from the shared mailbox, you'll need to provide the parameter SendAs to the PowerShell command Add-RecipientPermission
The links in the paragraph above should take you through the process of creating the shared mailbox either using PowerShell or the GUI based tool. In my example I'm using the email address print@mso365wiz.onmicrosoft.com for my shared mailbox.
2. Creating a mail-enabled queue in CRM Online
To create an email enabled queue go to Settings, then Business Management and then click Queues
Specify the email address of the queue (the smtp address of the shared mailbox - in my example print@mso365wiz.onmicrosoft.com) and make sure the e-mail access configurations are set to "Email Router"
3. Installing and configuring an email router
You can download the email router here and then configure the email router according to the directions in these articles:
CRM Server URL
To configure your email router you'll need to know which CRM Server URL to put in. Depending on the which part of the world your Office 365/CRM Online tenant is hosted in you must put in the correct URL.
In other words; use CRM when in NA, CRM4 when in EMEA and CRM5 when in APAC
You'll also need the unique organization name of your CRM Online - find it under Settings -> Customizations -> Developer Resources
In my example the unique organization name is mso365wiz. Since my tenant is in EMEA the full CRM server URL I'll need to put in is: https://disco.crm4.dynamics.com/mso365wiz
Inbound and outbound profiles
To configure the profiles for inbound and outbound mails in your email router to work with Exchange Online, you'll need to know the external SMTP settings of your Office 365 Exchange Online tenant. Open your Outlook Web App, click the question mark under your name and then click About
Scroll down and find the SMTP settings
In my example its pod51007.outlook.com, hence the full URL to the Exchange Web Services is: https://pod51007.outlook.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx
I hope this article will be of use to you by pointing to one of the many ways Office 365 and CRM Online are better together
See also
Office 365 partner? Looking to expand your business opportunities with new and existing customers in the public cloud? You should consider adding CRM Online to your portfolio. Office 365 and CRM Online go hand in hand, and you'll probably have several customers wanting to look into how CRM Online can benefit their business.
To get you started in and around selling and delivering CRM Online we have compiled this learning path
You'll need your MPN login to access some of the contents e.g the learning plan for the Solution Architect Role
I hope you will find the learning path helpful.
See also:
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A search result needs to be quick and easy to find and read - and on the same time display as much relevant information as possible to the end user. These two ambitions often conflict with each other - the more information you add to a result, the more "cluttered" the UI looks. The more "cluttered" the UI, the harder it is to scan.
The hover panel is an exciting addition to SharePoint Online 2013 and introduces a nice balance between the quantity of information and the organization of that information.
We pared down our inline results to contain only key pieces of metadata common to most results, such as the title, URL, and hit-highlighted summary. These compact, streamlined results enable you to easily scan the page. Then, when you want to learn more about a result, you can hover your cursor over that result to see the hover panel dialog box. The hover panel contains rich metadata that enables you to investigate a result more thoroughly, without having to click through and load the document.
In the hover panel we include an index of the section headings and slide titles that are inside of the document. We call these "deep links" and you can see them in the hover panel under the heading "Take a look inside". These headings and titles are links—clicking through will take you directly to that section (or slide) in the document! The bottom of the hover panel contains a list of actions that may be performed on a result. You can follow or open the document, view the document's library, or send the document in an email message right from the results page.
Most prominent in the hover panel is the high-fidelity Web Application Viewer preview, available for all Office documents saved to SharePoint. These interactive previews are big enough to give you a solid idea of the structure, contents, and styling of the document you're hovering over. You can page through the document, view charts and tables, and even see the animations of a PowerPoint slide (If the Word preview text is a bit too small for you, here's a hint—double-click to zoom).
Its now very easy for you to judge search results, because you can quickly scan through an entire document to decide whether it's the one you are looking for.
The October update to the Microsoft Office365 Deployment Guide (MODG) on TechNet has been released. The PDF version from Download Center has been retired and redirects readers to TechNet.
The MODG has evolved as an online IT Pro deployment resource library on TechNet. It is being aligned to support OnRamp with content that is customer scenario driven and topics which also provide context-sensitive online help for “Learn More” links. Additional "reskit" information was also added such as Deployment tools, which provide abstracts and pointers to downloadable applications/scripts and accompanying documentation.
Over 30 topics were updated in this release, with significant improvements to the "Advanced Overview", "Network", and "Client planning" sections. The "Top Deployment Considerations" topic now contains the "Top Ways to Prepare for Office 365 Deployment" Wiki post.
As of october 1st I'm in a new role in Microsoft. I've joined the fantastic CRM team here in Denmark and I'm very excited about how Microsoft CRM and CRM Online can help any organisation out there manage customer (or any entity) relationships.
Coming from Office 365 I'm a true believer of the public cloud, and you can expect more CRM Online content on this blog.
Office 365 and CRM Online are better together
If you havent done so already I encourage each and every one of you to see for yourself how CRM Online is made for Office 365. You can easily fire up a compelling demo and test environment using the fully automated process at the Demo Hub and experience the common user management, document management and more (I will be publishing a more detailed look at demobuilder soon).
Guide to help you plan and implement
The Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Deployment and Administration Guide is designed for administrators who need to plan and implement Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online in their organizations. The guide also provides information to help users achieve a smooth startup with the system.
The guide offers a roadmap of key administrative and deployment tasks, from adding and registering users through preparing the system for first use, and sending email to users inviting them to access the online service. There are links to step-by-step instructions for every task.
For administrators who subscribe through Office 365, an additional goal is to describe the integration of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online with Office 365, and how the integration works to provide a single location for effectively managing your subscription to this and to other Office 365 services that you might add in the future.
Find the guide here