On a client recently I helped deploy Microsoft D365 App for Outlook. Unfortunately, the behaviour requested by the client and the default behaviour of the Server Side synchronisation was not aligned.

This led to long discussions with Microsoft about some of the DB Org Settings we could utilise to tweak the way SSS works. As I researched these settings and discussed with my colleagues and during networking events, it became clear they remain unknown to most developers and administrators. If your deployment needed to tweak the settings, then people knew, but it is not common knowledge.

Further, there seemed to be very little documentation on what each setting does, apart from Microsoft’s own information here.

This is a series of posts explaining each of the Org settings, understanding how it affects your environment. Hopefully it will raise awareness of these settings.

Bear in mind that there a lot of settings that I can not find any information on or have no experience on. This is frustrating for me, but assume someone in the community will push me in the right direction and I will update the page when I find out.

How to Change Org DB Settings

Sean McNellis has an excellent tool on GitHub here which allows interaction with the org settings via a solution in your environment.

One the solution is imported, selecting the solutions gives you an interface where you can check the current status of each setting and change them.

To change the default, you need to select the Add hyperlink. This creates an XML file including your property which is uploaded to your system to change the setting.

Selecting the Edit link for the attribute now gives you a popup window, where you can edit the value

Also, Sean has included a copy of the Microsoft description with each setting.

On the right side of the grid is a link to to the KB article that mentions the setting, though normally it is just to KB 2691237 which is the central list of all Org settings.

ActivityRollupChildRecordLimit

This is a new one on me. Activities roll up. You put an email against a contact, the email is available on the account the contact is associated with. This applies to custom entities as well, if you configure the relationship correctly. Inogic has a great post on it here.

This setting must have come about to limit this as the numbers where getting too big for some. I have not got the data to do this one justice unfortunately.

AddressBookMaterializedViewsEnabled

The description doesnt tie up with the title, and when you google it, this setting revolves around a previous setting, Disable MAPI cache, that was around in CRM 2011 and helped improve performance. Not a lot more I can say.

AllowPromoteDuplicates

Duplicates in D365 are not unheard of, but when Outlook sync comes in, there are more chances to get duplicates. When a user syncs an Outlook Contact,

AllowSaveAsDraftAppointment

This flag opens up the possibility that you don’t always get a meeting correct the first time and allows you to save a draft.

Ulrik Carlsson aka @CRMChartGuy from eLogic solutions has a great article about this attribute.

The default behaviour is that users are not presented with a Save as Draft option for appointments, when a appointment is saved, if you are using SSS it will synchronise to Outlook and send out invites to the attendees as normal.

If you change AllowSaveAsDraftAppointment to true, the users get a different set of buttons.

Both Send and Send & Close buttons behave like the original Save and Save & Close. They will initiate a server side sync one the record is saved.

The new button Save as Draft will save the appointment but not send it to Outlook etc. It adds a [Draft] prefix to the appointment header and also a new field on the appointment, isdraft, is populated with true.

Weirdly, this field can not be added to a form. It just doesn’t appear in the field list. You can add it as view filter criteria, but you can’t display it as a column in a view.

AutoCreateContactOnPromote

By default, when a user sets regarding within the Outlook app, if any email address is in the To / CC / BCC etc that D365 does not know about, it creates it automatically.

Most of the time this is fine, but consider when your business process requires a lot more data fields to be populated in the contact, this default process will create a contact that hasn’t got what your business needs. Forcing the contact creation away from this automation may be required.

Users have an option under their personal settings which will mimic this settings, but this does it for everyone.

Setting the AutoCreateContactOnPromote to false removes the option from users and no contacts are created automatically when emails etc are synced.

AutoTrackSentFolderItems

This setting works in hand with the selected option under “Select the email messages to track in D365” option under Personal Options.

By default, sent emails are ignored, only picking up emails that arrive to send to D365.

By marking the AutoTrackSentFolderItems to true, sent items will also be tracked, from the next sync, not retrospectively

BackgroundSendBatchSize

ClientDisableTrackingForReplyForwardEmails

When a user receives a reply to an email that has already been tracked, the reply will also be tracked by default. This is great for keeping the chains of emails all within D365. Unfortunately, this may lead to conversations being tracked that shouldn’t and give visibility to sensitive conversations - a manager receiving an email that was a complaint about a particular email that their report sent for example.

Whilst this is mostly a training exercise, it can be quite embarrassing and this setting stops that. It does mean that you could lose out on a part of a conversation and rely on the user to track a response separately.

This settings, as noted, only works with D365 for Outlook not the App for Outlook.

DisableClientUpdateNotification

Only for the D365 for Outlook, will prevent the application checking for a new version. This will help if you are in a locked down environment and need the stability.

With the D365 App for Outlook, it is a constant deployment rolled out with other fixes by Microsoft.

DisableImplicitSharingOfCommunicationActivities

When an email, meeting, phone call etc. is created and an internal user is included in the recipients list, it shares the record with them. This allows the internal user to have visibility of the record within D365.

If your security model has an issue with this, then this implicit sharing can be removed.

Your model may restrict the visibility of activities depending on what record the activity is associated with in a team scenario. If the original recipient is no longer in the team, they should not have access to that information any longer. With the OOTB logic, this activity will still be visible.

This email will still be in the recipients Outlook, nothing changes to the visibility in exchange, it is just the visibility in D365.

DisableLookupMruOnOutlookOffline

This one is not obvious to me and there is no information online. I’ll update when I find anything out

DisableMapiCaching

This was present to prevent server performance issues, typically seen with on-premise solutions, when results are retrieved from the cache of the server, rather than direct from the database. It is unclear if still needed.

DisableSmartMatching

Smart Matching is how Microsoft works out that the email you just sent in belongs to a conversation that you have already synced, hence it will sync that email when it comes in.

In System Settings, you have several options when it comes to matching. Correlation is the default, where it is using a conversation id on each email to match them. You can supplement this with a tracking token and/or smart matching.

Token is generally used for support scenarios, to ensure any replies to an email are tracked against the same case.

Smart matching does what it suggests, using keywords in the subject and an algorithm to determine if the email is linked to a previous conversation.

Using the DisableSmartMatching flag does the same as un-ticking the box on the system settings, where conversation id and tracking tokens are relied on.

DistinctPhysicalAndLogicalDeletesForExchangeSync

This is another where security takes over and users expectations can differ from the way Microsoft thinks it should work.

If a user has been invited to a meeting, and it is recorded in D365, a copy of that exists within D365 and Exchange. If, for whatever reason, the user loses access (reas access) to that meeting in D365, the default behaviour would be to delete the copy in Exchange. Makes sense, to keep those in sync.

With the DistinctPhysicalAndLogicalDeletesForExchangeSync set to true, lose of access to any activity does not mean that the activity is deleted in Exchange. Use this with DisableImplicitSharingOfCommunicationActivities to fully get control of activity access.

DoNotIgnoreInternalEmailToQueues

This is used in combination with the Track emails sent between Dynamics 365 users as two activities available in the system settings

If you enable the Track as a separate option, normally any email from internal user to a queue mailbox will be ignored. This seems a weird consequence, but they have provided you with an override so that these internal mails are not ignored.

EnableAppointmentBroadcastingForOutlookSync

I can’t find any information on this. Will update when I find out.

EnableCrmStatecodeOnOutlookCategory

EnableSssItemLevelMonitoring

There is a dashboard available to admin already called Server-Side Sync failures, without this setting. Not sure what this does, as the dashboard seems to be available regardless.

ExchangeSyncIdMappingPersistenceTimeInDays

This setting defines how many days of sync failures are kept, useful when you are troubleshooting, but table will get huge quickly, so only increase if you need to.

ExpireSubscriptionsInDays

On creating my second post in this series I came across several configurations that were not documented in the KB article and hence were missed when I wrote this.

When you track an contact in Outlook, you are subscribing to changes made to those contacts in D365 so that they are mimicked in your Outlook. This is great, but each subscription is stored in a database record, hence impacting storage costs. There is a deletion service that works through the subscriptions and deletes these expired lines. after the value is reached, with an outlook Client refreshing it’s subcriptions as part of it’s sync routine.the

HideEmailAutoTrackOptions

This setting goes one further to the one below by stripping out “All email messages”, “Email messages from D365 Leads, Contact and Accounts” and “Email messages from D365 records taht are email enabled”, just leaving you with the two below.

HideTrackAllOption

Under personalisation settings for each user, they can decide to track all emails they receive from any source. Great for a shared mailbox or customer mailbox, but not for a normal user who receives spam and invites to cake sales etc.

The default here is Email messages in response to D365 mail, but to stop users filling your D365 instance, setting the HideTrackAllOption to true will remove that top option.

Any users that had this setting prior to it’s removal need to be updated manually or via the SDK.

IgnoreCopiedItemsInSSSForMailbox

Normally, when an email or meeting or task is synced, it doesn’t matter where that content came from. If it appears new, it will be created new, even if it is a copy of another item. This will reduce the amount of synced items but may be a concern for your environment.

MailboxStatisticsPersistenceTimeInDays

The Mailbox statistics records how frequently a mailbox is accessed and synced. This way, the more active mailboxes are synced more regularly. A mailbox that is infrequently used will be checked less regularly.

On a high user system, with SSS on, it can get populated quickly, so 3 days will normally be appropriate.

OutlookClientEmailTaggerEnabled

OutlookSyncDataSubscriptionClientsBatchSize

OverrideTrackInCrmBehaviour

Normally, a user can track an activity to D365 without associating with a record, the Set regarding. This could lead activities in your tenant not associated with a record, orphaned. Depending on your business requirements, disabling this feature could be required.

Normally, under the … under Not Tracked, the user has an option to Track without Regarding

Setting OverrideTrackInCrmBehaviour to 1 will override this behaviour, removing the ellipses button altogether. The user has to establish a link to an existing record to sync the email or activity.

OverrideV5SenderConflictResolution

Michael Sulz has a good write up on this, here.

Normally, if there are 2 or more contacts with the same email address (data quality is always a problem, however much you take care of it, though data8 do a real good job of removing duplicates and improving your data) the contact chosen is the first contact owned by the syncing user, sorted by create date or the first created if that doesn’t match.

Setting this option to true will force the user to make a decision and not sync the email automatically.

RestrictIRMEmailItems

Bhavesh Shastri has a great write up of this configuration here

Restricted messages, those that the sender has marked as any of the restricted types in Azure information Protection, may not be suitable to be included in your D365 system.

If you set his flag to true, the user will not be able to sync those that are protected and will be given an error message if they try to.

SecuritySettingForEmail

The majority of emails that a user receives and hence sync to D365 contain HTML to some degree, whether it is simple formatting or full on marketing emails.

In all scenarios, the interface presents a stripped down version of the email, but formatting etc will be lost.

There is a risk when these are displayed in all their glory in D365, that parts of the email could be nefarious, including scripts etc that could include phishing or other attacks. Microsoft by default warns the user that this is the case, but allows the user to click through to the content, putting the decision in the users’ hands.

If you change the setting to 2, the link to the full content is removed

Changing the setting to 3 removes the message and always shows the full version of the email

SendEmailSynchronously

Depending on your logic, you may interact by workflow when an email is sent via Outlook. This setting moves the send email to a synchronous operation rather than asynchronous, allowing a more immediate interaction with the email. This may have a performance impact on the user in Outlook.

SortEmailByReceivedOn

I am not sure that this is a problem any more, in Social pane in D365 we have a lot of options for searching, but back in the legacy UI this allowed you to change the email sorting from the date the email was edited or added to D365 to the date the email was received. This could be several days difference, so it could give a different perspective to the conversation.

TraceExchangeSyncData

Logging of the sync data is essential for any troubleshooting, but it adds to the size of your database. With the separation of log and data in storage costs, I am not sure this should ever be turned off if you are using SSS.

TrackAppointmentsFromNonOrganizer

You can always track a meeting if it was sent from an external user and by default, you can track any appointment where the organiser is a D365 user. This setting prevents the user from tracking an appointment if it is not them organising it.

TrackCategorizedItems

Using Category based tracking is a great way to allow users to track multiple emails at once. In the App for Outlook, this is the only way.

With the OOTB behaviour, the user gets a new category added and is able to select multiple emails to sync. It also appears as a great indicator in Outlook that the activity is synced.

Setting the flag to false removes this category and ability.

Be warned on this, if you leave any item with the category on it after you have disabled this functionality, re-enabling the functionality will mean that these items will be synced. Also, this category doesn’t respect the fact you upgrade. An email with the category that was synced to an on premise version will create a duplicate if that user is moved to the online version and the originating email was migrated as part of the data migration from on-prem to online.

UseCrmOrganizerForEmptyExchangeOrganizer

I think this is more to do with rare cases when the sync doesn’t work correctly, but another one that I can not find any information for.

UseFilteringMethodOfSyncingMailboxOnlyForCorrelation

Each user has a seperate filter list to decide which emails are synced to D365. These can be various settings on what that individual user requires.

The default for this setting, the standard OOTB behaviour, is false, where any user can sync this email if it matches their settings. True means that the user who created the email or synced it will be able to have the email included in the selection for the filter. It is in effect an additional filter for the user to only include emails I have created.

UsePlainTextForEmailTemplateBody

This is one of the older settings, presumably when people had email clients that could not handle html formatted text.