Connect Microsoft Outlook 365 to Salesforce to collect all meetings and emails automatically

Introduction is Philip and I run a company called wlow and we help Salesforce customers to supercharge their CRM by enabling them to do proper pipeline inspection and forecasting and one of the fundamental things we also do is to make sure that we help you to actually get all your activity data into Salesforce and what I mean with that is getting all your emails and meetings into Salesforce automatically because if it doesn't happen automatically it probably will never happen and one of the solutions that you can use that comes with a few flaws but is a pretty basic and simple way to achieve that is the Einstein activity capture from Salesforce I'll talk about the issues with that at the end of the video and you can make your own decision whether you want to move forward with that or not but let's get started with the integration it's really easy to get started with Einstein Connecting Einstein to Microsoft Outlook 365 activity capture in Salesforce you need to have two things ready one is someone with admin access to Salesforce and two you need to have someone who has admin access in the Microsoft 365 environment that you're operating in so an admin who can add entra applications or AER applications to your Microsoft 365 environment so if you have these two things you can get started and the best way to do that is to just click here on this little icon in the top right corner in Salesforce and then click on setup and when you click on setup it will forward you to the starting page of your uh Salesforce admin area and then here you can search for Einstein there will be a lot of different Einstein features uh popping up but uh the one that you want to select is called Einstein activity capture and then just click here on settings might take a while to load Salesforce isn't the fastest here uh but once it's loaded just click on the get started button and this will prompt a little modal and will ask you to select a proper environment and also to give consent that you are authorized to make these changes on behalf of your organization so in this case I'm going to pick Microsoft Office 365 that's the correct choice if your users are just using Outlook in the Microsoft 365 environment and then the right selection is the orc level of 2.0 this is the most modern approach uh that you can take this one the service account that's actually an old approach that Outlook is not going to accept or Microsoft is not going to accept for a long time anymore so just pick this one Setting up Microsoft 365 if you want to set it up centrally for your entire workspace if you want individual users to authenticate with Outlook themselves uh then you need to pick this one but we are going to go with this approach because it automates everything out of the box all right great so everything is set up automatically for you you don't need to worry about this part here at the top but uh this is where now the global administrator for the Office 365 account comes in so and that person needs to click on that link or you need to share that link with that person so I'm going to do that now it will prompt uh another model I will pick my demo account here and and uh I'll give uh consent on behalf of your application so those are two different things one is to use the exchange web service with full access to all mailboxes and to sign in and read all the different user profiles so you're going to click on accept perfect now the tenant ID has been added here now I click on test just to make sure everything is working and we can see great the connection is Configuring Einstein working and I'm just going to call this EAC Einstein activity capture for Office 365 great okay now once we've done this uh Salesforce asked us to review the settings there's three different things you can do you can enable and disable emails events and contacts so emails I think is pretty clear you want to keep that on uh for events you also want to keep this on in most cases however there's one suggestion I would like to make and that is to only use uh a one directional approach so um basically if you do both Direction what this means is that then an event is created in Salesforce it is also pushed into the Microsoft Office uh calendar um and vice versa however in most cases you want actually reps to use um the calendar in office to set up meetings uh and not use Salesforce this is pretty unst standard to set up meetings in Salesforce directly and it can also cause issues so if you manually log a meeting um and then suddenly Salesforce creates a calendar event for it meeting in the in the Outlook calendar this can actually cause a little bit of confusion especially if you have contacts added to that manual meeting lock so just make sure that you select only a one directional approach and the correct selection here is Microsoft Office 365 to Salesforce okay for contacts I actually suggest to keep this disabled you don't want Salesforce to automatically create contacts for you this is essentially what would happen then it's very hard to manage and it creates a lot of duplicates so only in this if you really know what you're doing okay next up there is a selection around a sync back policy you can take so you can select up to 180 days out of the box with uh Salesforce um other tools like we flow we actually offer up to two or 3 years depending on how long you've already been using Microsoft and Salesforce but that's the limitation you get with Salesforce so just going to stick with the 180 days and you can do the same for events so I'm also going to sync 1880 days back I don't want to sync private events private events are usually private for a reason however uh I do suggest to actually tick these two checkboxes uh event Series this basically means a recurring event so if you have a recular check-in between an account manager and a customer right um maybe once a quarter or mon a month then you want that event series actually to be locked to Salesforce in order to understand what's going on there and the same is true for removing deleted events if an event is deleted you don't want that to count as a meeting that happened um otherwise again this creates confusion so just make sure to check those two checkboxes all right going to hit next and now you can see I have two different options to actually Define which users should be using Einstein activity capture so one is I pick user by user and this will only work if you actually assigned a permission set to the users in advance I'm going to show you how that works later so uh stay tuned for that but the approach I actually suggest is to use profiles because uh what's happening with profiles is every time you create a new user in Salesforce you assign them a profile like a standard user profile or maybe you create a custom profile uh like like for example called account executive or something like this then um every time you add a new user to that profile they will automatically also have Einstein activity capture enabled if you follow the user by user approach then you will need to always go back manually select these users save that you know and then somebody uh leaves or you don't want them to use Einstein activity capture anymore you need to again manually remove it it's a bit tedious so I just suggest to actually use uh profiles and not users and then you know you just pick basically here the the standard uh user the account executive maybe you want to add system admins as well for testing purposes so um yeah that's what you can do and then finally the last step is before we go into the review is to actually um exclude your internal domain so in our case that would be getwe flow.com as an internal domain you can also exclude customer domains if you like uh let's say for example gmail.com or yahoo.com right if you don't even if you don't have them as customers right you can still exclude them hit the next button and then the final setting is whether you want to share or not share I suggest you share with everyone unless you have some restrictions or uh due to like some policies and finance and banking uh this could be an issue but for everyone else um sharing with everyone typically is the better approach more transparency typically uh leads to better outcome so here it asks us to review it one more time we did everything we could so I'm just going to click on finish and Y that's it we're done as soon as Salesforce has saved all these settings Microsoft Office 365 is now activated on an orc level um so automatically all the users who are added to the profiles that I set up earlier will now have Einstein activity capturing enabled uh you can always go back and change that so you can always click on edit here and then uh you know you can adjust uh the users that you want to have added the profiles you want to have added so all of these things they can still be tweaked um that's not a problem no so none of the settings that we created are permanent you can always go back and change it uh Creating the Activities Dashboard now there's one more thing I want to make you aware of and that is the activities dashboard unfortunately if you use Einstein you actually are not able to report on the activities out of the box so you cannot use uh reports in Salesforce to to create dashboards that is one of the many limitations that Einstein activity capture has you can only report on it if you enable this activity's dashboard now this is a basically pre-built dashboard from uh Salesforce themselves and you will only be able to use that to report on it if you want to have more reporting functionality uh check out some of the tools uh that are available like we flow for example get wef flow.com gives you a free trial if you're interested in that great uh okay so next up there is another thing that we need to do and that is setting up the permissions if you want to follow the user by user approach so let's continue with that if you want to follow the user by user approach you need to assign permission sets to these users first uh I already did that but I want to walk you through it anyway now so permission sets uh just type in permission here in the quickfind Permission sets for user-by-user authentication menu in the top right this will open up the option to click here on permission sets just do that click on that this will then load what you see here on the right side and then what's really important is is that you pick the right permission set so there are two different ones this one you'll find on the first page typically it's called Einstein activity capture sync C2C integration user this is the wrong one don't pick this one go to the next page and search for something called standard Einstein activity capture so uh here it is and then once you open this you want to click on manage assignments and then you see I already have three users assigned to this so I can not assign it twice but if I hadn't assigned it to them yet I could select it here and then click on the next button to assign it um I'm not going to do it because they already have that but uh yeah this is basically what you can do in order to assign the Einstein activity capture permission set to these users and what you're essentially permitting them to do is now to go and authenticate individually with their Microsoft account with Einstein or Salesforce in that case um so if I now go back to Einstein uh activity capture I click here on settings I go to the configurations I click on edit here um what I can do then is those users who have the permission that assigned I can add them here to the list and what you see here is essentially that the use of users and profiles is actually not mutually exclusive you can use both in combination you can assign a few profiles to and in addition you can also assign individually uh some users so for that I think it is useful um but generally again I do recommend to follow the approach with the profiles only this is the safer and lower maintenance approach so this the safe Choice better to follow that one so Einstein itself is A better alternative to Einstein not a super bad solution however there are a few issues with it and you see actually a lot of people on the internet complaining about it so don't take my word for it just just search for Einstein activity capture and you'll quickly find a list of all the problems that people have with it and this is also the reason why Solutions like we flow are out there because they give you more control and they just give you a peace of mind that everything will just work and I want to walk you through some of the major issues that you'll typically accounter with Einstein activity capture uh not from me but actually from people on the Reddit for in Salesforce so one of the examples here is if you change the email address for an account the entire email history disappears this is a huge problem and it's actually generally true for all of Einstein so if you remove Einstein from your account you will not have any email or meeting history anymore it will just disappear from your Salesforce so you don't own that data Salesforce owns it and that's a big problem Additionally you cannot have more than one email address for an account or a contact for an account actually I think uh that is fine that's an email domain but for a contact you typically send emails to multiple contacts and you should be able to also sync one email to multiple contacts that's totally possible with other Solutions like we flow but you can't do it with Einstein similarly um the big problem is that you cannot manually log on email anymore when you use Einstein so if you Ed the Chrome extension before you cannot do that anymore that's quite unfortunate it would be nice if it worked both together again you can do that with we flow another example is that it just stops randomly working for a couple of days uh you then lose out all the activity ities and you can also not sync back without quite a bit of like additional manual work so that's a big problem and these outages they just keep happening um and then finally the other issue that I want to highlight is that often you have to create additional flows to properly allow Einstein to attribute emails correctly to contacts and opportunities it's quite unfortunate I I think Einstein actually could do it out of the box but you need to create these additional flows for example to automatically associate contacts uh as contact role with an opportunity even though they're sort of like part of the same account and there's only one opportunity open it will still not be able to sync that email automatically to that open opportunity so yeah uh these are some of the issues there are more definitely it's worth out checking other Solutions again I want to highlight we flow we are very confident in our solution you find a comparison of what wlow can do versus Einstein on our website get we.com and you can absolutely trial our product for up to two weeks for free and we'll make sure that everything works for you okay that's it from me thank you very much have a great day and good luck with the integration