E-mails with attachments tracked in Microsoft CRM 4.0

Earlier this month I asked a question to the Microsoft CRM community and my LinkedIn network about e-mails with large attachments set regarding an item forwarded through the CRM organization (By the way, LinkedIn tagline and position are really helpful in identifying who in LinkedIn you can ask a question to – subject of another blog post entirely.). I wanted a definitive answer I could tell our clients who ask these kinds of questions (they have).

Specific use case

Receive email with large attachment.
Set regarding a CRM record in the Outlook client. (message is now being tracked and stored in CRM)
Forward the same email in Outlook to multiple people.
Does CRM hold onto multiple copies of the attachment?

I got many responses, and some appeared to conflict with one another. No one was able to give me an answer that definitively said yes or no.

Getting testy

So yesterday, I finally opted to test it out myself.

From personal GMail, sent email with an attachment ‘creepy-surgical-mask.jpg’ to my work email address, which is in my test CRM organization.
Received email. Clicked Track in CRM on Outlook toolbar, and set regarding a particular CRM record.
Forwarded this email to 4 other users in my test CRM org
In Outlook clicked View in CRM to see the CRM record for the email.
CRM noted that the email address was not associated with a Contact. Chose a Contact to associate it with. Saved record.
Clicked link in Regarding to open related CRM record.
Clicked History. Saw two records: one for initial tracked email; one for forwarded email.
Opened CRM SQL database and ran the following script:

select * from ActivityMimeAttachment
where FileName='creepy-surgical-mask.jpg'

Noticed two records with distinct ActivityMimeAttachmentId’s.
Body field contains textual representation of ‘creepy-surgical-mask.jpg’. (that garbledegook you see when you open in a text editor or in Word)

Conclusion

Microsoft CRM holds onto multiple copies of the attachment in this scenario. If you or your organization using Microsoft CRM do not want to track the attachment multiple times in CRM, remove it from the email when you forward to others.

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Tags: attachments, Documentation, Dynamics CRM, e-mail, mscrm

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 16th, 2010 at 6:28 am and is filed under Case Studies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Daniel Johnson, Jr.