Trouble tracking appointments?

Posted by Mike Snyder on September 20, 2007  |  Comments (0)

Just recently, I noticed that I was having problems tracking my Outlook appointments to Microsoft CRM. When I tracked an appointment and saved it, I would receive the following error message:

To make matters worse, if you click "Yes" and save the appointment with errors the next time that the CRM Client for Outlook syncs it will remove this appointment from your calendar entirely. Yikes! Obviously tracking Outlook appointments in CRM is one of the key benefits of the system so I wanted to get it working again...and fast.

Fortunately, Microsoft's support website is very strong so I was hopeful that I could find a resolution to my problem online. I logged into the PartnerSource website(customers would log into the CustomerSource website) and I entered the error message text into the KnowledgeBase search feature. Voila! I found KB Article #911516 had the answer to my problem. If the owner of the appointment (the person clicking "Track in CRM") has their email address in the CRM database more than once, you will receive this error. Each record in Microsoft CRM only has one owner, so duplicate email addresses would obviously cause this problem because the system can't determine which record should be the owner. It would be nice if the error message said that instead of the somewhat misleading "No resources have been selected for this activity" text, but I was still able to track down this problem within just a few minutes.

This problem appeared recently because I had entered my email address into a test Lead record to send sample ExactTarget emails to ourselves. When I removed my duplicate email address, I was able to track appointments again without any problems.

On a side note, you won't be able to access this KB article in the public Microsoft support search so you'll need to make sure you get access to the KB articles on CustomerSource/PartnerSource. The content there is different sometimes than the public support site.