Communication error while configuring Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Outlook

Recently our company’s CRM online environment was updated to CRM 2015. This meant that those of us who used CRM for Outlook had to upgrade their CRM for Outlook to the latest version in order to support CRM 2015.

The outlook client itself has undergone some changes, but those are not in the scope of this blogpost. You can read about it here.

After installing the new outlook client, and starting the configuration wizard, the following error message popped-up:

Searching the internet for this error message, a lot of possible causes for getting this error showed up. What eventually pointed me in the right direction was this article on the Microsoft support site.

The instructions are easy enough and the explanation is clear. But after following them, I did not find an issue in my sitemap. I actually went through the xml of the sitemap several times before I saw the problem.

I recreated the issue in a demo environment where I created a sitemap that looks like this:

As you can see, there are multiple areas which in turn contain some groups which contain the subareas. In the sitemap documentation, it is stated that the subareaid should be UNIQUE. Looking at this xml, you can clearly see that the same id is used for multiple subareas.

CRM itself does NOT complain about this, proven by the following image:

So at first I thought this couldn’t be the issue. As you can see that every path to a subarea with id nav_accts is unique. Simplified in a tree it looks like this:

• Area Id=SFA
  • Group Id=Customers
    • SubArea Id=nav_accts
  • Group Id=SFA
    • SubArea Id=nav_accts
• Area Id=CS
  • Group Id=Customers
    • SubArea Id=nav_accts

But for the outlook client, every subareaid should be unique within the AREA that it resides in, REGARDLESS of the groups. I did not find this little quirk documented anywhere.

And sure enough, after modifying the id of one of the subareas in the SFA area, I could go through the configuration wizard without issues.

The result in outlook:

This concludes this blog post, hope it helps!