With the latest releases of Dynamics CRM Microsoft is focusing on Service and have delivered several improvements on SLA, USD, Social, Experience HUB, etc. This is all great and a multi-channel strategy is exactly what we need to have. However, for many customers the fact remains that a huge share of the communication still require email and will so for years to come.
Working as a customer service representative (CSR) in a busy call center the need to work efficiently is extremely important. Current situation for customers using Dynamics CRM in their service department is that they either have to context-switch between Outlook and CRM or accept the fact that their e-mails will look like they were created decades ago (including handling frustrating issues caused by auto-save and faulty HTML).

Some of the challenges customers face are:
• Not possible to attach images inline.
• Adding attachments require multiple clicks per attachment – no drag-and-drop.
• Related to the previous point adding attachments from document libraries such as SharePoint/OneDrive is a very common requirement (we all know CRM have the integration but it is not exposed where the user needs it nor with the required functionality).
• Lacking sufficient text styling (just the very basic options are provided).
• No real support for email signatures.
• Sender should be set automatically based on case/email queue association or using a default sender set per user/role (important for service orgs working on a common mailbox that the sender address is a common email address).
• Difficult to read large emails as the windows is too small. Need dynamic sizing of email content window.
• Often customers of CRM users exist within several records, such as multiple contacts or accounts, as they have more than one relationship with the company. Tracking emails from these customers is troublesome as CRM has no way of knowing which records to track against. In such situations a UI for overriding/guide tracking would have been great.
• The email form provides no functionality to add the new KB articles to an email. The old (and mostly never used) article button is still part of the UI. Wanted functionality is to be able to search for and add the new KB articles both as inline text in the email and as a PDF attachment.

The optimal and most requested solution is to bring the Outlook Web Access (OWA) editor into Dynamics CRM. A tighter integration could potentially also enable tracking of emails directly from within the CRM web client.

Would like to stress that the user should/must still work within CRM having the OWA client as the email editor. As we are progressing towards a real multi-channel solution it is not viable to embed the full CRM experience into OWA.

As a final note I want to stress that this is the single most important issue I face meeting customers when selling and delivering Dynamics CRM. We are losing customers due to this single issue.

There are several feedbacks on connect related to email and the need for a rich text editor. A quick search returned:
• https://connect.microsoft.com/dynamicssuggestions/Feedback/Details/715397
• https://connect.microsoft.com/dynamicssuggestions/Feedback/Details/686637
• https://connect.microsoft.com/dynamicssuggestions/Feedback/Details/713413
• https://connect.microsoft.com/dynamicssuggestions/feedback/details/611420

It is my hope that PG understands the urgency and that my fellow connect users help me show the priority this issue require by voting.


(keywords: email, e-mail, rich text, editor, OWA, exchange, outlook, RTE, tinymce, ckeditor, rich-text, tracking, KB, service, CSR)