Dynamics CRM Outlook client running on Terminal Services

A client recently wanted to use terminal services sessions for all its users. In the morning they login to their PC and start a remote desktop session to the terminal services (TS) servers and use their roaming domain profile to do all their work in TS (including saving all their documents to the networked “My Documents”). This will allow them to centrally manage all the software that a user has access to such as Office, Internet explorer etc as the users would be connecting to one of 3 TS servers. Their PC is essentially a dumb terminal and any PC can be used because all their programs and files are stored centrally.

They asked could we install the CRM Outlook client on these terminal servers which we initially thought “no problem”. So instead of having to roll out the CRM outlook client via group policy using a MSI file we just used the standard installer and installed CRM outlook client and rollup 6 on the 3 TS servers. When someone logs in and configures their profile they can see the CRM toolbar, the CRM navigation tree on the left under their Inbox etc and all was working fine until they actually tried to use CRM from Outlook.

In outlook if they hit the “Track in CRM” button or choose the “CRM” menu and then “Options” instead of showing the CRM options dialog it shows this error message.

“The caller ID does not match the subscription owner id. Only Subscription owners may perform subscription operations” It seems CRM does not like the fact that multiple users are using the same TS machines based on this article

This is similar to the problem where only one person can have the “synchronizing client” checkbox turned on for multiple PCs in the CRM settings in Outlook.

The solution is to delete the “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MSCRMClient\OutlookSyncSubscriptionId” but that will only work for the current users domain account.

So from a quick bit of background checking on how the registry sets these current user keys it would appear that deleting the same OutlookSyncSubscriptionId key in the HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT section and any other existing profiles under HKEY_USERS means that when they login these settings will get copied to HKEY_CURRENT_USER and the new settings will apply.

This was done on all 3 TS servers and no more problems…

I hope this is of some use to someone else faced with using Terminal Services and the CRM Outlook client.