Adding Outlook Contacts to Dynamics CRM 2011

This is a question that comes up time and again….. I recently imported an address book into my Outlook and I want to add some of these contacts to our CRM system. How do I do that efficiently?

Here is a quick example:

Mary Smith and John Johnson from ABC Company are in my Outlook Contacts but currently don’t exist in our Dynamics CRM 2011system.

Step thru the Add Contacts Wizard to add them to CRM:

1-Click on CRM > Add Contacts

2-If you have more than one contacts folder, select which Outlook contact folder you want to use and clickAdd Contacts. Otherwise, go to the next step.

3-The wizard will then analyze your Outlook Contacts and organize them for import.

4-Select how to group your contacts.

- Company Name. This is a free-form text field in the Contact form. Grouping requires an exact match. For example, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online will not group together contacts with “Microsoft” and “Microsoft Corp” for their company.

- E-mail Domain. This is the part of an e-mail address after the @ symbol. For example, in the e-mail addresssomeone@example.com, “someone.com” is the domain. You can group all of contacts with e-mail addresses with the same domain together.

- Categories lists any colors and labels that you have set up to organize items in Outlook.

5- By default, Advanced options are shown.

- Use Company Name to be the Account. This check box is selected by default. If the Outlook contact record contains a company name, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online creates or links an existing Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online account record to the contact record.

- Track all communications for added contacts. Select this check box if you want to track and link e-mail messages to and from the contact to the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online contact record. This also links appointments.

6-Clear the check boxes of the items or groups of contacts that you do not want to add.

If you want to review the list of specific contacts, click the item or group in the list. When you are done, click theClose button.

 

7-Click Add Contacts.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM adds your contacts. A summary page displays showing the total number of added contacts, accounts, e-mail messages, and appointments.

In this example, a new Account record called ABC Company and 2 contacts (Mary Smith and John Johnson) were created associated to ABC Company. All communication for the added contacts would also be associated to those contacts if you selected that option.

 

 

 

Summary

If you have a lot of customer information in your Outlook contact list, you can copy that information into Microsoft Dynamics CRM by using the Add Contacts Wizard. The Add Contacts Wizard takes your Outlook contacts and creates contact records in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The wizard also links your Outlook and Microsoft Dynamics CRM contact records.

 

This link launches the Personal Options dialog, the “E-mail” tab is selected to show the tracking options.

**The new option for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 for Outlook is:

**Auto-create: Auto creates the sender of the e-mail or meeting organization as a contact or lead. By default, this option is enabled.

Happy CRM’ing