Information Worker is the interface that logs emails to CRM. But IW only runs on a pc, not on a phone. Does anyone know of an app or a means to enable logging of emails sent from a phone. For most other CRM packages (e.g. Salesforce, ACT, etc.) that’s a given. Outside sales people often send as many (or more) emails from their phone as from their laptop. We’re losing lots of valuable communications by not capturing emails sent from phones.
A related thought: we’re also looking for a means to capture INBOUND threads to email conversations. IW only captures OUTBOUND emails.
There is a Mobile CRM app for your phone. It uses the phone’s capabilities for mapping, pictures, etc. But for email, you can go into a customer contact and click on the email address and it launches the email client, but I can’t say for sure that it will ‘log’ the email to the contact… I know that it does NOT monitor the inbox like InfoWorker does (and tries to match contact emails addresses). We have the Mobile App being used by 1 or 2 people but it’s really just being used as a big
If InfoWorker will check the sent items, then mail sent from a phone’s Outlook email client would show up when Outlook synchs up, and therefore IW would catalog them… there’s no retro-index process that I know of… but it’s been so long since we tried to use IW
Mike, thanks for the suggestion. I tried both the phone’s native mail app and Outlook mobile app installed on my phone. While emails sent from either will show in the Outlook sent folder, those messages don’t end up in the ‘CRM Calls’ folder in Outlook. IW creates that folder and emails sent from Outlook to ‘verified’ contacts (i.e. found in the CRM database) are copied to that folder to be logged to the database (under customer) next time Outlook syncs with Epicor. I also confirmed that emails manually copied to the CRM Calls folder ARE NOT logged to Epicor. Are you sure you were able to sync emails sent on the phone to the Epicor database?
[Mobile Outlook → synched to PC Outlook → IW doesn’t see them]
Hmm, they don’t synch in the scenario you tested, that’s good to know.
Sorry if I confused the issue… I was actually referring to using the Mobile CRM app on the phone. I don’t know if sending an email to a contact on the phone will store it in Epicor. Specifically, I mean sending it from inside the Mobile CRM app and clicking the contact’s email address - not sending directly from the Outlook client/contact on the phone. I’d have to get the CRM app set up on my phone again to test it.
If you have CRM Module licensed, then the Mobile App is free. You can get it form the Play Store and then you need to install a BAQ package and do a few easy things, but you can get app running in a short while.
I have the CRM App. Where can I get the BAQ pkg? That would be great if the emails sent by clicking on a contact in the app will result in log messages. I have a suspicion ‘no’ because of how Epicor charges you for every piece of functionality.
the installation is in the downloads section of EpicWeb where all the other downloads are… you might have to look in previous version though.
there is a single PDF for installation - it’s quite easy. The tricky bit is to NOT change the security stuff until you understand how it works. I had to use SQL to ‘undo’ my mistake
nope, works fine for my on-prem install. If you want to access it from the internet (public) you’ll need a
public DNS name set up to access it through your firewall - and the appropriate setup for your firewall to redirect the connection to your appserver
I’ve done this before with Service Connect and/or BPMs. It isn’t difficult as long as you have enough access and control to the email system you use, because it needs forwarding rules etc set up. It works a lot better managing it all on the server end than trying to handle it through clients.
I faced the similar issue when a client was considering Epicor CRM and outlook integration was essential.
The client was on 365, so I created a VS app using MS Graph that I deployed to 365.
The app looked in a designated mailbox (e.g. sales) and then matched the ‘To’ email address of all the emails to an email in Epicor and then created a CRM call for the customer/ contact and attached the HTML to a UD field on call entry call (EmailText_c) using the Epicor API.
Once the email had been loaded into Epicor, the email was moved to Archive.
Ultimately, the app would be scheduled to run periodically.
The idea worked in principle, but ultimately a tighter integration with Outlook was required with calendars etc, so the client moved on to a more sophisticated CRM system.
Overall though, it was a good exercise into understanding the working of Azure and Enterprise apps and certainly an option if you just want to capture customer emails and are running on 365.
Andrew, that’s a very creative solution. I’m wondering if you think the same could be done using PowerApps & Epicor’s REST api to accomplish the same thing?
Another possible route is to use the modern Outlook Add-In capability. Give views of Epicor data within Outlook (new add-on is JavaScript based and will work in the Outlook app, Web, or Mobile). Capture your email text and read and send and use REST to update Epicor. Andrew’s solution is better than syncing email though. Integration Views are much easier than data syncing.
