Many of our customers have been upgrading to Outlook 2016 lately. Actually, they’ve all been using Office 365 for a while and are finally starting to use all of the benefits they get with it. We have customers running all versions of CRM, from 2011 to Dynamics 365 On Premise including everything in the middle. Some can’t upgrade CRM because of dependencies, some don’t have the time to upgrade, and some just don’t think they have to. This can be challenging in getting the Outlook Client to work properly. This leaves us with making sure CRM Client for Outlook works on Outlook 2016 with CRM 2011 or CRM 2013.

While some of the docs may tell you that’s not possible, it is and those docs are out of date. Both CRM 2011 and 2013 can work with Office 2016 if the latest updates are applied. For CRM 2011 that would be with Update Roll 18 and the Latest Update, and for CRM 2013 it would be SP1 with Update 4. I always go to the Build Numbers blog when i’m not sure. I recently had an issue where a customer had issues with the CRM 2013 Outlook Client on Office 2016. The issue was that the Configuration Wizard simply didn’t load. It generated an error in the Event Log, but did not display any User Interface at all, and the process didn’t start. I enabled the trace option for the Outlook Client and sent the details to Microsoft. After many hours of investigation and even hearing that CRM 2013 is not supported with Outlook 2016, we managed to find the missing piece - we were missing the latest update for the Outlook Client!

So now we know there are a total of 4 installs for each computer that has Outlook 2016 and wants to connect to CRM 2013

  1. CRM Outlook Client
  2. Update For Service Pack 1
  3. Update for Service Pack 1 Update Rollup 4
  4. Critical Update for Office 2016

We were missing that last one… As soon as we installed it everything was working as always.

Let us know if you also have issues with getting the CRM Outlook for Client working with Office 2016.