Reading Pane for any CRM Entity displays Outlook Contact Card in Outlook Client for CRM
In this article, I am covering the issues and scenarios we face with Dynamics CRM functionality when an older version of Outlook is un-installed and a user upgrades or installs newer version of outlook again in same machine.
As we all know CRM for outlook client is widely used by CRM users which gives them ease to access CRM directly in their Outlook, it is very important that we know if we have remnant of older version of Office Outlook it creates issues with certain CRM functionalities.
For instance if you have recently upgraded from Outlook 2007 to Outlook 2013 32 bit or 64 bit.
Recently, I saw a unique issue that occurs if Outlook 2007 remnants are left in your machine. We see that the CRM Reading pane in outlook client for CRM is showing only contact preview for all entity records.
We click on accounts or contacts or leads but it opens your contact card from outlook in the reading instead of showing the actual record.
We made sure that we uninstalled Outlook 2007 using a usual method of uninstall from control panel add and remove programs. Tried looking at various option how it is related to our reading pane issue.
How to go about Troubleshooting such Issues
- I would advise everyone that first we should always start with checking Microsoft Office Interop Assembly in control panel "add and remove programs" for any kind of issue or any unexpected behavior in CRM.
- Next, I wanted to make sure if we see any errors in Outlook while navigation in CRM section. So I enabled UI errors
File > Options > Advanced and in the Developers section check the 'Show add-in user interface errors' then restart.
There were no errors.
- Next try following steps which is basic step everyone follows using, but still worth mentioning in this blog
1. Uninstall The Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011/2013 Client from Control panel.
2. Delete MSCRM folder from C:\Users\Your username\AppData\local\Microsoft\MSCRM
3. Perform similar step for C:\Users\Your username\AppData\local\Microsoft\MSCRM and delete MSCRM folder if it exist.
4. Uninstall Office 2007 Completely.
5. Uninstall Office 2010
6. Install Office 2010.
7. Install Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011/2013 Client.
- Then researched on registry keys that get added when we install Outlook. We found that whenever we install any version of Outlook we get following registry key added :-
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\TypeLib\{00062FFF-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}\9.3]
"PrimaryInteropAssemblyName"="Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71E9BCE111E9429C"
This corresponds to Office 2007.
If the user is using Office 2010, they will need to be using the following:
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\TypeLib\{00062FFF-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}\9.4]
"PrimaryInteropAssemblyName"="Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook,Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71E9BCE111E9429C"@="Microsoft Outlook 14.0 Object Library
- So, based on Outlook versions it would different in different environment as below:-
9.2 Outlook 2003
9.3 Outlook 2007
9.4 Outlook 2010
9.5 Outlook 2013
Of course there are various other keys which get added with install of Outlook but this was one of the registries which was causing issue with CRM.
- We checked that we had Outlook 2013 where we had issue with Reading pane showing us Contact card and even after uninstalling Outlook 2007 it had this registry and it wasn’t removed during its uninstallation.
- Thus we made sure we have required permission to rename or delete the Outlook 2007 registry key 9.3 to 9.3_old so that it does not refer to this anymore. Thus, we renamed it
- Restarted the Outlook and checked the issue was resolved
Additional Information
In certain scenario you might get an error while deleting or renaming this key
"Cannot delete 9.3. Error while deleting key"
For this you can follow below kb :-