Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 and Exchange 2007.......

I posted a while back about the updated CRM Email Router for Exchange 2007, and the fact that you need to keep an Exchange 2003 or 2000 Server in your Exchange environment in order to run it.  Well, a while back I found an issue with CRM and Exchange 2007.

If you send a meeting request to other CRM users from Outlook, tracking this in CRM - and you and/or the recipients' mailboxes are on an Exchange 2007 Server - you may see that all recipients of your meeting request with the CRM Sales for Outlook Client installed will end up with TWO entries for this meeting in their Outlook calendar.  Why????

The issue is that Exchange 2007 essentially breaks the association that the appointment has with CRM.  Then, when your client synchronizes with CRM again, it pulls down the appointment that resides in your CRM activities.  The only person not affected by this is the person who tracked the email, as they are the ones who placed it in CRM to begin with (their original meeting is then associated with CRM, and Exchange 2007 does not balk at this).

Microsoft was able to recreate this issue, and is currently working on patches for the Outlook 2007 and 2003 clients to resolve this issue.

In the meantime, we were able to work around the issue by running this command against every CRM user mailbox, from the Exchange Management Shell:

set-mailboxcalendarsettings "Domain/Users/User" -AutomateProcessing None

This essentially turns off new server-side processing in Exchange, and puts that burden on Outlook (Just like Exchange 2003 works today).

One side-effect we saw in turning this off - we had set read permissions on the user mailboxes from the Exchange Server, and this was lost.  We had to revert back to setting these permissions from each user's individual Outlook experience. 

I'm sure there are other things impacted by disabling AutomateProcessing on the Exchange Server - I just have not been able to test them all out yet.  So I would recommend you test this fully in your environment, if you need to make this change.  You can always change this setting back in Exchange, if you need/when the patches are released.