Question

I’m setting up Dynamics CRM on a VM to demonstrate the functionality to some clients.

I’d like to demonstrate the email functionality, e.g. send an email to the server and check an activity is created.

I’ve started to configure the E-Mail Router, but it looks like an instance of Exchange is required. Is there anyway to demonstrate the functionality without Exchange (which isn’t really my area of expertise).. Is there any test harness I can use?

Note: I want to demonstrate the functionality on my VM and not any service in the cloud.

Answer 1

Crm can’t send or receive an email itself, it uses the email router to communicate with email servers to send and receive email.

When I’m using the email router I generally find exchange to be an easy option. However you can also use POP3 and SMTP email servers (e.g. yahoo mail), I haven’t done it myself but its described here:

E-mail systems

The E-mail Router can connect to one or more e-mail servers running
Microsoft Exchange Server or Exchange Online. The E-mail Router can
also connect to POP3-compliant servers to provide incoming e-mail
routing. For outgoing e-mail, you can use SMTP and EWS (Exchange
Online only). For more information about the e-mail server versions
and protocols that Microsoft Dynamics CRM supports, see Microsoft
Dynamics CRM E-mail Router software requirements in this guide.

Another option that is worth considering is the Outlook Client, this is probably the quickest route for a quick demo.

If you install Outlook on your VM, connect it to an email account, hook it up to Crm, then you can use it to manually promote emails into Crm. With this approach you could probably even miss out actually connecting it to a real mailbox, just create tasks and emails in outlook and then promote them. Perhaps this is good enough for demonstration purposes.