Many of our customers have been asking about the ominous alert that appears in their advanced settings area for either Dynamics 365 or Power Apps Model driven environments. In this short post I will explain it, and show you how to get rid of it.

Dynamics 365 for Outlook

The integration of Dynamics 365, or Model-Driven Power Apps, to Outlook has been around for a very long time and has seen many changes over the years. The current version is an App, but the previous version was a piece of desktop-installed software. Back in 2017 I had written about the shift from old to new. Well the time came were it was finally officially deprecated… 10/01/2020. Even though this was over 8 months ago. some folks are still using it, so they are seeing this notice:

“But Steve, were just started with Microsoft and are seeing this notice!!!!”

Wrong Default

So even though Microsoft deprecated this feature over 8 months ago, it is still set as one of the defaults in a brand new environment, therefore showing this message. You did nothing wrong, it is a Microsoft issue, I have made them aware (quite a while ago), and for some reason it is taking them a ridiculously long time for them to update this.

How to get rid of the Alert

First, if you have seen this alert message, then you already have the privileges necessary to get rid of it. Here’s the steps:

A. If you are not already in the Settings area:

1. Click on the gear, from within any app.
2. Click “Advanced Settings”

B. This will open the Settings Area, where we see the offending alert at the top. Let’s get rid of it!

C. To get to Email Configuration:

1. Click the down arrow next to Settings
2. Then click on Email Configuration

D. The Email Configuration area will open:

1. Click on “Email Configuration Settings”

E. A System Settings modal will open, where we will find the problem. The Default setting for “Appointment, Contacts and Tasks” is wrong.

Click on the picklist and select “Server-Side Synchronization”, and then click OK.

This is the thing Microsoft needs to fix. Unfortunately for you, you are not done yet. Since this was the default when created, it was automatically applied to all of your mailboxes. So now we have to update those as well. So while you are here, click on “Mailboxes”.

F. The mailboxes view will open:

1. Change the view to “Active Mailboxes”. You can see in the red box above that they all have the wrong setting.
2. Click the “check all” box, and the ribbon will change showing more options.
3. Click on “Apply Default Email Settings” (Which we changed in the earlier steps).

G. A modal dialog will open:

Select “All records on all pages in the current view”. Unless this default is changed on all records, even unused ones, the alert will persist.

Since you do not want do anything other than clear the alert, I suggest you uncheck the two boxes below.

H. Refresh this page (If you have a lot of records, you may need to refresh a few times)

We can now see that the defaults have been changed for all mailboxes, and guess what? The Alert is gone, never to return!!!

I seldom write “Technical” posts, but this issue has been annoying me.

Dynamics 365 for Outlook Deprecated
There are users in your organization still using Dynamics 365 for Outlook, which is retired as of Oct. 1, 2020 and is no longer supported