What methods are available to sync outlook tasks with custom CRM application

Question

At our company we offer a CRM platform for leasing companies and it includes task management. Some of our clients would like to sync those tasks with outlook so they do not have to switch between applications.

I do not have lots of experience with outlook, so I don't know about its extensibility features.

What options do we have?

• Live syncing possible with some uri? (.ics, .xml?)
• Writing some kind of extension?

What do you guys suggest is the most simple solution to this problem. Remember it's just syncing simple tasks, nothing more, nothing less.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I guess this depends on how your CRM system works. At my company we develop a webbased CRM system which means that the client can't really access the database outside of the web application. Our customers also wanted the ability to sync appointments with our activity calendar, so what I did was to write a simple web service from which data could be downloaded to the client. I then created an Outlook add-in using VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office) that took this data and created/updated Outlook appointments.

But as I said it all depends on how your system works.