Introduction to the Outlook Connector

An overview of what the Outlook Connector is, and how it is used to synchronise information between Workbooks and Outlook.

Most Workbooks Users have a wealth of valuable information about their business contacts and communication with those contacts stored in Outlook and visibility of this information within Workbooks is vital to share among your business.

Users will want to continue using Outlook alongside Workbooks and be confident that the two systems are in sync and accurate.

The Workbooks Outlook Connector is an Outlook plugin that will automatically synchronise data between Outlook and your Workbooks database. This allows you to use either Outlook or Workbooks for handling your ongoing communications and providing the data in an easy to find manner. 

Watch our two helpful videos which cover installing and using the Outlook Connector:

When installing the Outlook Connector, please ensure it meets the System Requirements.

What can be synchronised?

The Outlook Connector allows you to synchronise a number of record types. It is primarily used to sync People, Activities and Emails records, where Workbooks People records become Outlook Contacts and Activities become Tasks or Meetings. 

You can also attach Emails to other records such as Organisations, Cases, Opportunities and Sales Leads. This allows you to relate the email to that record so that it will appear on the Email tab within Workbooks, so that other users remain up to date with your latest emails. 

By default the Outlook Connector synchronises all of the records in your My People view (ie, records that are either Assigned To you or that you’re watching) and creates them as Outlook contacts. You can then choose to apply filters to control exactly which records are synchronised, giving you complete control over what data is shared between the systems.

How does the synchronisation work?

When synchronising emails sent from Outlook, the Connector searches your Workbooks database for People or Sales Leads that have the same email address as the recipient and when it finds a match, links the email to the appropriate record.

If there isn’t a matching record at the time you send the email but you later create a record with that email address all the previous emails will be linked to that record. This applies to email addresses held in the Main tab on a Person record as well as any valid email addresses held in the Contact Details tab.

In order for items in Outlook to be synchronised, they must first have been shared with Workbooks.

When does the synchronisation happen?

Synchronisation can be scheduled to run in the background, alternatively if you need data to synchronise immediately you can also force a sync at any time.

There are two different sync types, one will only sync data from Outlook to Workbooks which can run up to every 2 hours. The other will do a complete sync between both systems and can be run every 30 minutes.