A lot of us used several products throughout the years to synchronize between Contacts in CRM with the Contacts in the user’s Outlook folders, whether with the Outlook Addin, Server Side Sync or other third party products. In 2011, we released the first version of Exchange Sync, which allowed synching Marketing Lists and CRM Contact records with Exchange Distribution Groups and Mail Contact records. The product has since then been sold in the US and Europe, and gone through various iteration as CRM and Exchange evolved.
Exchange Sync provides synchronization across the different versions of CRM (On-Premise, Partner Hosted and Online) as well as the different versions of Exchange (On-Premise, Hybrid/ADSync and Online). The way the application works is that it synchronizes between Marketing Lists (or custom entities), which contains lists of Contacts, and creates Distribution Groups in Exchange and adds the Mail Contacts to those Distribution Groups in Exchange.
Why do we need this?
The purpose of Exchange Sync is that a lot of organizations do not send their emails from CRM, but send it from Outlook, and they need the ability to send their email to a particular group of Contacts (or Distribution Group). The Marketing List in CRM maintains the list up to date, and the Exchange Sync application synchronizes with the Exchange Address Book, so users can send emails from Outlook containing the latest list of users.
To learn more about the features of the Exchange Sync application, click here.
What is the Community Edition?
Although the release is available in multiple editions, we decided to release an edition of the product to the Dynamics Community Free of Charge. This edition contains many of the features of the Full product with a few limitations, which include some features, deployment options and automation.
Deployment Options: Available for Dynamics 365 Online and Exchange Online Only.
Automation: No Automation is included in the Community Edition. Sync must be run manually be user running the application.
Support: As this is a free release of the product, support will only be provided via email (or web forum)
If you would like to try out the community edition, fill out the request for here: