Office 365 Integration: How It Works

This article covers how email and calendar sync behave day to day once your Office 365 integration is set up. If you haven't finished setup yet, start with Office 365 Integration: User Setup.

How email sync works

Emails sync when the sender or recipient's address matches an individual who shares a community with your mailbox. The individual doesn't need to be assigned to you specifically, a shared community is enough. When that's true, the CRM records the message as an Email Out or Email In activity on the individual's profile, with the message body saved as a note.

If the same email address is stored on more than one individual, the activity goes to whichever of those individuals is assigned to you. If none of them is assigned to you, none of them receive it.

Sending email from the CRM

Open the individual's profile you want to email. Click the Send Email tab at the top of the activity box. Enter the recipient in the For field, choose a template if you have one, add a subject and body, and click Send.

The send editor supports multiple recipients, images, attachments, links, and formatting. A sent email creates an Email Out activity with the subject as the description and the body as a note. The activity may take a few minutes to appear, because the CRM waits for confirmation from Outlook. If a send fails, a cancelled activity is created noting the failure.

Replies to emails you send from the CRM go to your Outlook inbox. If two-way email sync is active, qualifying replies are recorded on the individual's profile automatically.

How calendar sync works

Calendar sync runs in the background in both directions.

From Aline CRM to Outlook

Timed activities (with a start and end time) appear on your Outlook calendar, titled with the activity name; the event details link back to the activity and individual in Aline CRM. All-day activities sync only when your administrator has enabled the Sync All Day Tasks setting; if that setting is off, all-day items are skipped in both directions.

From Outlook to Aline CRM

Events you create in Outlook appear on your Aline CRM calendar as the activity type your administrator selected (for example, Appointment). Imported events are not automatically linked to an individual, so they show "Not specified" in the For field. To link one, open the activity in the CRM and choose the individual in the For field.

Changes sync too

Cancel, reschedule, or delete an item in either system, and the matching item is updated or removed in the other. If you rename or move a calendar event in Outlook that originated in Aline CRM, the matching activity's title and time update to match. Allow a short delay; calendar changes may take a few minutes to appear.

Calendar events imported from Outlook do not count as activities in CRM reporting.