Microsoft 365 in the CRM: emails, meetings and Teams

With Microsoft 365, your customers’ history fills itself in from Outlook, with nothing to retype. The emails you exchange with CRM contacts go into their timeline. The emails you put in an Outlook folder arrive in your “E-mails to handle” queue. Your Outlook meetings with a contact are suggested to you as activities. This article explains how to connect your account, what is read and what never is, and what the administrator sets for the whole workspace: exclusions, calendars and won deals announced in Teams.

Before you start #

• The CRM module must be enabled for your workspace and open to you (see Enabling and administering the CRM module).
• Permissions in the role matrix, CRM menu: “CRM contacts — View” to open CRM › Microsoft 365, connect your account and read your queue; “CRM activities — View” to see the suggested meetings, and “CRM activities — Create” to turn them into activities; “CRM settings — View” to see the workspace settings, and “CRM settings — Edit” to change them.
• Preparing the records of an email with AI requires “CRM accounts — Create” and “CRM contacts — Create”, and the CRM AI must be active in your workspace.
• The Microsoft 365 connection is opened by Illizeo for the platform. If the screen shows “The Microsoft 365 connection is not available on this platform yet. Nothing is read until it is.”, no account can be connected: contact Illizeo.
• Everyone connects their own account. An administrator cannot connect another person’s mailbox, nor read a colleague’s queue.

Connecting your Microsoft account #

1. Open CRM › Microsoft 365.
2. In My Microsoft account, read what the connection allows Illizeo to read: your profile (name and address), your emails read-only, your calendar read-only, and keeping this access without asking you again.
3. Click Connect my Microsoft account. Microsoft opens: sign in and give your consent.
4. You come back to the page with the message “Your Microsoft account is connected.”.

Once connected, the block shows the Account, the Connected on date and the Last check. Illizeo reads your mailbox and calendar and never writes to them: nothing is moved, marked as read or deleted. No email from before the connection is read, except one you later put in the “E-mails to handle” folder.

If Microsoft refuses access, the page shows “Microsoft did not grant access: the connection failed. Try again, or ask your Microsoft administrator to allow Illizeo.”.

Logging your emails with CRM contacts #

The Log my e-mails with CRM contacts box is not ticked when you connect: until you tick it, no email from your mailbox goes into the timelines. Once it is ticked, every 10 minutes, Illizeo reads your inbox and your sent items again. An email is logged when one of its addresses (sender, recipients, copy) belongs to a CRM contact. It is attached to that contact and to the accounts the contact is attached to.

An email is never logged in these cases:

• it is marked Private or Confidential in Outlook (the “Personal” level does not prevent logging);
• one of its addresses, or its domain, is in the workspace’s Never logged list (see below);
• none of its addresses belongs to a CRM contact: it is ignored and does not go into your queue.

The same email seen in two mailboxes, yours and a colleague’s, is logged only once. Unticking the box stops logging; what has already been logged stays. Ticking it again starts from that moment: emails exchanged during the pause are not read.

Reading a logged email #

On a contact’s or an account’s record, open the Timeline tab and filter on E-mails if needed. Each email appears as “E-mail received” or “E-mail sent”, with its subject, sender, recipients and an excerpt. Click the subject to read the body: the window shows which mailbox it was logged from, and the accounts and contacts it is attached to.

A logged email can be read by anyone who can read at least one of its contacts or accounts. If an exchange must not be shared with your colleagues, mark it Private in Outlook before sending it, or ask your administrator to exclude the address.

The “E-mails to handle” queue #

The queue gathers the emails you want to bring into the CRM, for example a contact request from someone who is not in the CRM yet. They arrive in two ways:

• through the Outlook folder you choose in the “E-mails to handle” folder list: any email put in that folder arrives in the queue, whoever sent it;
• through the workspace forwarding address, even without a Microsoft connection (see The CRM forwarding address).

Only you can see your queue. It has three tabs: To handle, Handled and Ignored. On each email to handle:

• Read expands the body, the recipients and, for a forwarded email, the note written when forwarding and the attachments;
• Prepare the records asks the AI to suggest the account, contact, opportunity and tasks drawn from the email. Nothing is created until you click Create the records; the email then moves to Handled and joins the contact’s and account’s timeline, or waits for an approver’s decision if your workspace submits these creations for approval;
• Mark as handled or Ignore files it without creating anything. This choice cannot be undone from the screen.

The folder is read every 10 minutes. An email you put in it after choosing it arrives in the queue at the next check, whatever its date of receipt, and keeps that date there. Emails that were already in the folder when you chose it do not arrive as long as you leave them alone: one you later read, flag or categorise may arrive in turn. So choose a folder kept for this purpose. An email already in the queue does not come back, even if you move it out of the folder and back in. Choose No folder so that nothing arrives this way any more.

Suggested Outlook meetings #

The Suggested meetings block lists the meetings in your Outlook calendar, from the last 7 days to the next 30, where one of the participants is a CRM contact. They are never taken automatically, whether logging is ticked or not.

1. On a meeting, click Create the activity.
2. Correct the Title, taken from the subject, and the Account, suggested from the contact’s main account, if needed. The account is required.
3. Click Create the activity. The message “Activity created.” offers to open it.

The activity created is a meeting, with the date and duration, the place, the video link and the contacts you can read. A meeting that has already taken place becomes an activity that is done (see Activities and “My activities”). Dismiss removes the suggestion for good. A suggestion also disappears when the meeting is cancelled, made private or confidential, deleted, or no longer has a CRM contact.

Disconnecting, and when the connection expires #

Disconnect my account stops reading your emails and calendar, after confirmation. What was logged stays in the timelines. When you reconnect, everything starts afresh: the logging box is unticked, no folder is chosen, and nothing earlier is read.

Microsoft may end the access, for example after a password change or if you withdraw your consent. You then receive a single notification, “CRM: your Microsoft connection has expired”, and the page offers Reconnect my Microsoft account. After an expiry, reconnecting keeps your choices and resumes reading where it stopped. This notification can be turned off in Personal Settings › Notifications, row “CRM — Microsoft 365: connection expired”.

Workspace settings #

The CRM administrator sets Microsoft 365 for the whole workspace in Settings › CRM › Microsoft 365. Each change is saved at once.

• Never logged: Addresses and Domains (subdomains included, without @). An email exchanged with one of them is never logged and never joins a timeline, even if it involves a CRM contact or someone creates its records from their queue. Enter the value, then click Add; the cross next to a value removes it.
• Calendars: with Put CRM meetings in calendars, a meeting created or changed in the CRM goes into the calendar of its author and internal participants. It goes through the calendar each person linked in Personal Settings › My calendars (see The calendar and syncing your work calendar). Anyone without a linked calendar sees the meeting in Illizeo only. Off by default.
• Announcement in Teams: with Announce won deals, each deal marked as Won is announced in the chosen Channel, with the deal, the account, the owner and the amount, unless Hide the amount is ticked. Without a channel, no announcement is sent. Off by default.

The announcement requires Microsoft Teams to be connected to the workspace. The channel is chosen by someone who also has the “Application store connectors (OAuth connect / disconnect)” permission at the Execute level. The message is written in the company’s language, once per win.

Good to know #

• Only the inbox and sent items are read for logging. An email that an Outlook rule moves straight into another folder is not logged.
• Only emails exchanged after an address has become a CRM contact’s are logged: creating a contact does not bring in their past emails.
• The workspace exclusions apply to logging and to timelines. An email you put in the chosen folder yourself arrives in your queue whoever sent it. If it involves an excluded address or domain, you can create its records, but it does not join their timeline.
• An email from the folder whose records have been created moves to Handled and joins the contact’s and account’s timeline, on its date of receipt, like an email forwarded to the workspace address. If it had already been logged, it appears there only once.
• Without the “CRM contacts — View” permission, or if your Illizeo account is deactivated, nothing is read any more, even if the connection still shows.
• When a contact is erased for data protection, the emails attached to no other contact are erased with them. Exporting a contact’s data includes their logged emails (see Protecting contact data (GDPR)).
• When two contacts or two accounts are merged, the emails logged on the absorbed record move to the kept record; an email it already had appears on it only once.

FAQ #

Microsoft asks me for an administrator’s approval. #

Your organisation requires its Microsoft administrator to allow third-party applications. Once they have allowed Illizeo, everyone can connect their account; access stays limited to each connected person’s mailbox and calendar.

An email with a customer does not appear in their timeline. #

Check that the address used is recorded on the contact’s record, that the email is not marked Private or Confidential, that neither the address nor its domain is excluded, and that the logging box is ticked. Allow up to 10 minutes: the Last check date shows the last pass.