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Configuring CRM 4.0 R8 On-Premise E-Mail Router with Exchange Online / BPOS

January 27, 2010

If you need to configure the CRM 4.0 on-premise e-mail router at rollup 8 to work with Exchange Online or BPOS, you will need to use a pop3 and SMTP configuration for your CRM e-mail router until Microsoft releases an update that supports BPOS from directly within the router. Here’s how…

Over the last week I’ve discovered that you can configure the router different ways to work with BPOS. Of course you don’t have to use the router at all, if you configure all your users to use Outlook for sending and receiving all CRM Mail. But if you want the automated capabilities of the router can provide, here’s the choices today:

Configure 2 E-Mail router configuration profiles for each user to directly connect to their BPOS mailbox using POP3 & SMTP. This approach is the simplest but will require more maintenance each time you add or remove users.
Use a CRM forwarding mailbox on BPOS to minimize the number of POP3 accounts. This configuration requires a single BPOS POP3 connection for the CRM mailbox and manual forwarding rules in each user’s BPOS mailbox. You use mailbox forwarding rules like you would on in-house exchange server to forward all user e-mails to the CRM mailbox for processing. The mailbox rules have to be set up manually, but you don’t need to ask BPOS support for help on it.
To reduce the number of outbound SMTP connections, you can set up a configuration for an administrative email account which has the permissions to “send as" any user in Outlook.

BPOS does not configure a POP3 mailbox automatically, you must file a support request with a list of the accounts you need POP3 access to. Be aware that the request for POP3 support can take several days to a week for the Microsoft exchange online team to execute. Plan accordingly.

Once our POP3 access was enabled, we decided to use a single CRM mailbox account with POP3 support and to grant complete "send as" authority to an administrator for processing all outbound e-mail not handled via Outlook.

POP3 configuration

the incoming E-Mail Router Configuration Profile for the CRM mailbox. Notice that for access credentials we have chosen "other specified" and put in the password for the CRM mailbox BPOS account.

Next,the Microsoft CRM Dynamics deployment contains the default inbound and outbounde-mail router configuration profiles for the deployment.

Under “Users, Queues, and Forward Mailboxes ", on the forward mailboxes tab,

we can update the information about the forwarding mailbox with the incoming configuration profile that we set up earlier. Note that the e-mail address of the because accountis entered here and must match with the password of the incoming configuration profile.

SMTP Configuration

Next we create the outbound SMTP e-mail router configuration profile for the administrative account. This can be set up for just a single administrative account with "send as" rights in BPOS or you can create one for each user that needs the ability of the router sending e-mail for them.

Now that you created the SMTP router configuration profile, you can associate it with any outgoing configuration profile for user or queue provided that it has "send as" rights. In this example, we use a single administrative account for the outgoing profile for all users. The same example is using the forwarding mailbox for all incoming profile configurations.

Remember, if you use the forwarding mailbox you will need to create manual mailbox rules that will forward to the CRM mailbox. I show you how to do that here.

The other trick is to grant "send as" permissions to the CRM administrative mailbox . You accomplish that by downloading the BPOS migration toolkit and running the Migration Command Shell from the kit.