General Interest

Categorizing tracked e-mail in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online

You are a busy professional who sends and receives a large quantity of e-mail messages. Fortunately, you have Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, so you track these messages from Microsoft Office Outlook and associate them with the account, contact, or opportunity that they pertain to.

But say that you want to further categorize these e-mail messages, so that when you look through a mile-long list of e-mails on a contact record, you can see those tagged as, for example, "Product Question."

On the E-mail activity form, there is a Category text field, which can be used for this purpose. However, you will notice that when you view the e-mail record for a sent or received e-mail in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, the form is read-only--you cannot edit the Category field.

This is by design. When an e-mail has been sent or received, the record in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online is deactivated. You would not want users going in after the fact and changing the contents of an e-mail record--this would call into question the integrity of the activity history in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online.

Also, the Category field does not map from Outlook to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online.

So how can you categorize tracked e-mails in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online?

It actually is quite easy to do using a simple one-step workflow.

Categorize tracked e-mail in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online

Create a workflow associated with the E-mail entity. In this example, call it something like "Set Category: Product Question."
Set this workflow to run on-demand.
Insert a step to update the e-mail record. Click the Set Properties button to open the E-mail form. Click on the Category field on the form. Type "Product Question."
Save and publish the workflow.

Now you can run this workflow rule from individual e-mail records, or select multiple e-mails from the history view and classify them as Product Questions. Repeat these steps for additional categories.

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