Update: This bug is fixed in CRM 2016 Update 0.1
I really like CRM 2016 On-premise. It’s got all the stuff I love from CRM Online 2015 Update 1, and the whole product seems quite polished. But…
Something is really wrong with that Outlook client. I click a random entity, and the whole thing freezes for near 30 minutes. It’s bizarre. My customer was none too happy with this revolutionising new feature. That’s understandable. A lot of CRM users prefer the Outlook client as their entry point into CRM.
So out came Fiddler on the client machine, and down into the depths of the database we traced, and deep in the %AppData% we did dive. What I found was that when you click an entity in the Outlook client’s CRM UI, it starts building a cache table for the entity. For every single record. While blocking the UI.
I looked around and the nearest thing I found to describing this issue was in this article:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2741514
But, that fix does not help our issue. So I got in touch with MS support. Sadly, this is not a known issue, yet. The case is still ongoing, and I hope it will result in an official fix.
In the mean time, I got creative and decided to pull out Process Monitor, and see what registry keys were being accessed – for lack of an official MSDN overview of CRM Outlook client registry keys.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MSCRMClient\{organization id}\AlwaysShowWebGrid = 1
Did the trick. Judging from the name and behaviour, I think what this does is tell the CRM Outlook client to just show the content through the browser, and not use whatever this new presentation framework is. I’m guessing it’s some sort of legacy mode.
One catch- the ribbon acts kind of funky when this mode is enabled. It will not always switch to the context of the view you are on, and the default New buttons don’t seem to work.
Still, it’s a lot more usable than Outlook simply crashing. So I hope you can use it as a temporary workaround while MS fix this bug.