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Running Microsoft CRM 3 without Exchange Server

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As many of you know, I am a Solution Specialist for Microsoft CRM, which means I am the first line for sales questions generally for CRM in my area.  Many of the blog posts here have been a direct result of emails and phone calls from my partners asking “how to”, “if” and “will this work” questions. So with that in mind, this post is NOT an official knowledge base article, statement of position, or even official enough to bother emailing to your friends.  

So the bottom line, this whole post is because I am lazy and am getting tired of writing the same email to different folks every week. Special Thanks to Dominic P from the Dev Team for proof reading and giving me a ton of information to build this on.

Before we go down this trail, let’s disclaim as follows: “The Best User Experience and Tested Solution for Microsoft CRM involves using a Microsoft Exchange Server, either standalone or utilizing Small Business Server. That is the environment our development was done in, our testing was done in and our support folks have the most amount of knowledge around.”

So, you want to deploy Microsoft CRM WITHOUT Exchange. Your first question is why? Normally the answer is one of two things.

  1. The organization is massive (or at least fairly large) they have a history with Lotus Notes or Oracle or (insert email server here).
  2. The organization is pretty small. Email is probably outsourced or delivered as a POP3/SMTP Solution for them.

So let’s get some common misconceptions out of the way right up front. Microsoft CRM does NOT REQUIRE Exchange to run. However, if you do not have an Exchange server, you will not have some functionality available to you. You will still have a CRM system with functionality that rocks, a killer user interface, awesome reporting and a ton of customization ability.

Let’s also talk for a second or two about a prefer method before we start talking about what exists without Exchange. It is co-existence. If you can create a rule on your mail server, have it "forward as an attachment" a copy of your mail to an Exchange Server. (Make sure it is a Forward As An Attachment and not a redirect, not a forward, otherwise all of the emails will get attached to where your email address is or the CRM Router will not work.) If you have a customer that has Lotus Notes, let’s look at this option as well.  (It does have a drawback, in that HTML get all of the coding stripped from them.) Yes folks, that generally does require the installation of an Exchange Server. (That would be in addition to the existing mail server.)

So, with all of that underway, let’s go through three areas that CRM has and handles mail. This is ONLY for Microsoft CRM 3.0. The Stuff that worked and didn't work in 1.2 was a little different, and being that I have a short memory, who cares about 1.x... :-)

Outlook Client

  1. The Outlook Client is ONLY supported when running against an Exchange Server. Period.
  2. In my 1.x days, the support was the same way. However, the Outlook Client worked very well with POP3/SMTP emails. You will need to manually promote each email to CRM. In 3.0, the enviromentational wizard will not allow this to work. The Outlook Client assumes that there is a Exchange Schema and things may not fare well unless it finds the schema it thinks should exist. So:
    1. For example, a Hotmail Store is not writable, so trying to save linking state will result in an ugly error message.
    2. For POP3, information is stored locally, so the link is made, but it will only work on that machine. (It is NOT test and NOT supported, but it may work.)
    3. IMAP, this scenario is not supported or is it being developed towards.
  3. This is also checked by the installer when CRM installs, so unless you do a reg hack, you will never get this far to begin with. :-) (I am told, that this architecture may change for our "Titan" release. As more details on "Titan" become available, they will be posted here... :-) )

Outgoing Mail

  1. Outgoing Mail from the Outlook Client is handled via Outlook’s Mail Transport. So IF and that is a BIG if, the Outlook Client works with your POP3/SMTP Server, then it will be attached to CRM as an activity.
  2. For Outgoing mail from the CRM Forms. (In either Outlook or the Web) CRM does NOT need to be Exchange. Does NOT require installing an outbound component. Can use a local or remote SMTP stack from Exchange SMTP stack, OS SMTP stack, third party SMTP stack.

Incoming Mail

  1. For that you are on your own 100%. You would need to cut and paste emails from your email system to Microsoft CRM just like you would for any other CRM system.
  2. If you are ambitious, the API’s exist and you could write the functionality for your customers yourself. 

UPDATE: New information released. Click Here for an update.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 04, 2006
    I just want to let you know that we are currently in development of a Lotus Notes adapter for Microsoft CRM. Initially, it will support recording inbound and outbound emails from Lotus Notes and Novell GroupWise to MS CRM. We will then follow up with data synchronization of contacts, calendars, and tasks if we feel the customers need that functionality.

  • Anonymous
    February 05, 2006
    Thanks Glenn. We will do a whole post on it as you get closer to release. As somebody who used your solution in the past, I am sure it will rock and provide a ton of value.

  • Anonymous
    February 06, 2006
    What about running CRM3 on a Hosted Exchange platform? I guess this is possible but will this require the hoster to support CRM3 even if it's installed on a local server?
    Or are there any other things to be aware of in this case?

  • Anonymous
    February 06, 2006
    Got another question: What if we had a local ExchangeServer but still recieved mail via our POP3 accounts and arhcived it in an Exchange mailbox on the local server???
    Would this be possible and still have all funcionality of CRM3?

  • Anonymous
    February 09, 2006
    Roed,
    I have not gone down that rabbit trail and probably won't have time until after Convergence. (End of March) I would watch for some announcements from the product team as it is a practice to release some products or new features at Convergence. (No, don't ask, I don't know.)

    Thanks
    Ben

  • Anonymous
    February 27, 2006
    We posted some basic steps back in January. Corporate just released an offical White Paper. Read my blathering...

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2006
    The biggest help to using MSCRM without Exchange would be the ability to promote multiple emails at the same time.

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2006
    Why would you want to promote them all at the same time? The cool thing to me about promotion is the abilty to select what the emails get attached to. So doing it in bulk would be sorta counter to that... :-)

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2006
    Good comments about Exchange.  We will provide Exchange Server at no additional cost to our hosted Microsoft CRM 3.0 clients just because we're so jazzed about the benefits of this integration.  If we're hosting a client that wants to stick with POP3, we'll still configure an Exchage user account and deploy a forwarding schema.

  • Anonymous
    March 26, 2007
    hello, I want to know if there is a guide regarding how to configure CRM 3.0 using a POP3 Server. Thanks

  • Anonymous
    June 24, 2007
    We pop our mail directly from the hosting company. I use wingate as mail server. how can i configure crm to use the same

  • Anonymous
    June 25, 2007
    Thanks for a great article, Ben!  We are using Outlook Anywhere (RPC over HTTP) and I have been able to successfully connect to our CRM server without the recommended VPN connection.

  • Anonymous
    August 07, 2007
    To which article is ksearles (June 25, 2007) referring to? I am also looking for a way to implement CRM in combination with outlook anywhere.