Drowning in Outlook Reminders? This might help.

Today’s guest star is CRM MVP Mike Snyder of Sonoma Partners. He is also the co-author of the books, Working with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 and Programming Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.

One of the GREAT new features in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 is the ability to get pop-up reminders in Microsoft Outlook for activities created in CRM. Our company Sonoma Partners uses Microsoft CRM on a day-to-day basis for our own sales, marketing and service and we have a lot of workflow automation setup on our customer records to automatically create follow-ups activities such as tasks and phone calls. By default, Microsoft CRM will create reminders for every record it syncs into Outlook that has a due date. Consequently, a large number of customer records and a large number of automated activities means a large number of pop-up reminders!

Personally, I have found that sometimes these reminders were a bit too much for me and I found myself wishing I had less pop-ups. This is especially true if you don’t include the customer’s name in the activity subject because otherwise you will see a reminder dialog that looks like this (not terribly useful because all the records look identical).

Fortunately, I picked up a neat little registry setting trick from former CRM Product Manager Michael Lu. By adding the registry setting OutlookSyncDisableTaskReminders to your client computer (not the server) at HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/MSCRMClient and setting its value to 1, the Outlook client will not create reminders on activities it syncs into Outlook.

This solution won’t work for everyone, but I find that it works pretty well for me.

WARNING: Using Registry Editor incorrectly can cause serious, system-wide problems that may require you to re-install Windows to correct them. Only administrators will have the necessary permissions to perform this modification. Microsoft cannot guarantee that any problems resulting from the use of Registry Editor can be solved. Use the Registry Editor at your own risk.

Cheers,

Mike Snyder