Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Microsoft CRM - Outlook client doesn't load...

I've just finished fighting with MS-CRM Outlook add-in. It was really time consuming for no good reason.

The battle story:
The MS-CRM was working just fine from the IE interface but I wanted the Outlook interface. After installing the Outlook add-in I got the following message when I started Outlook:
"There is a problem communicating with the Microsoft CRM Server. The server might be unavailable. Try again later. If the problem persists, contact your system administrator."

I found two posts in the MS-Knowledge Base which didn't helped at all:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/910090
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/913509/

After digging some more in the MS news groups I found the solution (for me, and I guess for most poeple with CRM out-of-the-box). You can skip to step 3 in order to verify this is your problem with the CRM.

1. Add the CRM site to the trusted sites list in IE (Tools->Internet Options->Security, click on "Trusted Sites" then "Sites" and add the site URL).

2. Verify that the trusted sites passwords are stored in IE (Tools->Internet Options->Security, click on "Trusted Sites" then "Custom Level", go all the way down to "User Authentication" -> "Logon", and choose "Automatic logon with username and password")

3. Open MS-CRM in Internet explorer and insert the password. Close IE. Open again and verify you don't have to enter the password again. If you do, you did something wrong in steps 1 or 2.

4. Open Outlook.

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