Mail Merge in CRM Online

This post comes from one of my co-workers who has been doing some extensive work with CRM Online. This was spurred by some data connection errors that we saw both from CRM Online as well as a couple of On Premise installations. The error only occurs through the web client, from what I am told, but basically the data connection stored in Word to pull all of the CRM data gets corrupted upon creation and isn't usable...making your CRM Mail Merge pretty lame. This is a work around for this issue. Microsoft is aware of the issue and is working on a hotfix.





Setting up Mail Merge in CRM Online. Here are some errors I got while setting up Mail Merge Documents in CRM Online, and what I did to fix it.

First I have to start with a blank Document. I choose my data fields and click ok. Here is the message I get.

"Opening the document will run the following SQK Command:
Data from your database will be placed in the document. Do you want to continue?"

I click Yes and then get this message:




From here, If I choose to "Find Data Source", I get stuck in an endless loop and can’t do anything. If I choose “Options”, then I can remove the data/header source.

Sorry for the small image, but the two buttons are "Remove Data/Header Source" or "Remove All Merge Info".

Then its regular mail merge. If I am using the web client, I have to go to Add-Ins, and click ‘CRM’. If I’m using the Outlook client, it opens the mail merge.

Once I create my xml template and upload it into CRM, I don’t have this problem with the data source anymore. I only have this problem when using a CRM Out of the Box template of doing a mail merge to a blank document.

Also, Outlook users don’t have to click Add-Ons> CRM one inside of word either, only web-users have to do that.

That should get you going and give your users some options if you ever run into this issue.

David Fronk and Team
Dynamic Methods Inc.