Overview
Microsoft 365 Sync for email gives your firm reliable access to a complete history of email engagement, helping you better understand client relationships and keep your employees compliant. Seamlessly align your digital correspondence with the client system of record for better relationship management and whole-of-firm compliance.
Please note: The functionality described in this article will not be available in your organization unless Microsoft 365 email sync has been enabled. For information on enabling the integration, please consult our Enabling Microsoft 365 Email Sync article. This integration works only with Microsoft Cloud and is not compatible with on-premises or self-hosted Exchange servers.
Integration Summary
Microsoft 365 Sync is a paid add-on feature. Contact your Client Success Manager to discuss pricing in more detail and sign up for the service.
Please note: The number of users granted access must match the number of licenses in your Practifi contract.
The Microsoft Outlook integration remains a great low-cost option, but Microsoft 365 Sync improves on it in two crucial ways:
- Emails are captured automatically, rather than relying on the user to opt in to sending them. This ensures your email history in Practifi is comprehensive and accurate, and reduces your team's workload.
- Microsoft 365 Sync is enabled for your email server rather than on devices themselves, meaning you only have to set it up once for everyone to be included, instead of installing it for each employee individually.
Our solution is built using Microsoft’s industry-leading Azure cloud services, so there are no additional vendors to perform due diligence on. And thanks to its serverless architecture, the sync engine never stores your firm’s emails, meaning you can be confident that the content of your emails remains for your eyes only.
Learn more about what makes Microsoft Azure the trusted cloud for organizations of all sizes, from startups to enterprises to governments.
Using the Integration
Understanding the Sync Process
When enabled in your organization, the Microsoft 365 Sync works as follows:
- When an employee whose mailbox has been enabled for Microsoft 365 Sync sends or receives an email, that message is included in the next scheduled run of your sync service.
- At the scheduled time, our sync engine processes all new emails sent and received since the last sync was performed and sends them to Practifi without storing any details on our servers.
- Once in Practifi, emails are matched with Individuals and Contacts captured in the system, based on their email addresses. Email addresses used by the matching engine can be stored either in the Email and Alternate Email fields on Individual and Contact records or in related Contact Point Email records, providing unlimited matching options.
- Matched emails appear in the Activity Timeline of the person in question, appearing alongside the other aspects of their comprehensive profile, so every interaction is visible in context.
- When an email includes CC'ed recipients who match Individuals or Contacts in Practifi, the email also appears in their Activity Timelines.
- Unmatched emails can be accessed from the Emails page in the employee’s Practifi app. Use the Relate to People action to link them with Individuals and Contacts at scale.
When performing the initial sync with your Microsoft 365 instance, we retrieve the last six months of message history, meaning only your most relevant communications will make their way into Practifi.
When you enable a new user for the sync service, we sync their history from the same point in time used during your organization's initial sync, so the new user's message history is continuous with everyone else's. Configurable historical sync is currently unsupported for this integration.
Viewing Synced Emails
The Emails page is available in all our role-based apps, such as Advisor and Client Service. It presents users with lists of matched and unmatched emails, along with a range of useful filtering options, such as the dates the messages were sent and synced. Because the layout closely resembles a familiar inbox, it's an efficient way to review how incoming emails have been synced to people in Practifi.
For unmatched emails, the Relate to People action makes it easy to link those emails to Individuals and Contacts at scale, ensuring no client communication slips through the cracks. To use it:
- Select the emails you wish to relate.
- Search for the name of the intended recipient.
- If you want to store an email address on the person’s record for automatic matching in the future, check the Create a Contact Point Email record related to this person checkbox and select the email address you wish to store.
Internal Email Considerations
The sync service ignores internal emails. An internal email is defined as one in which all email addresses in the To, From, Cc, and Bcc fields are on internal email domains. The administrator defines the set of email domains considered internal when setting up the service. This keeps client timelines focused on external communications.
Suspicious and High-Risk Email Content
Salesforce's built-in reporting tool lets you surface suspicious and high-risk email content by filtering email lists for specific keywords and phrases in the subject or body. We’ve included a report named Suspicious Emails Last 60 Days in your organization to help get you started, using the top 10 email fraud words and phrases identified by Ernst & Young and the FBI.
Compatibility With Practifi Protect
Practifi Protect and Microsoft 365 Sync can be enabled simultaneously. However, the encryption introduced by Practifi Protect prevents Microsoft 365 Sync’s record-matching logic from operating. This means firms cannot encrypt the following fields if they want to make use of them in the matching process:
Email (Contact)
Alternative Email (Contact)
Other custom email fields on Contact
Email (User)
For more information, please see this Salesforce documentation.
Sentiment Analysis
As a part of this email integration, Microsoft’s Azure Machine Learning analyzes emails sent to the organization. It rates them as positive, neutral, or negative, giving teams an at-a-glance signal of client sentiment alongside the messages themselves. This information is surfaced in the following areas within Practifi:
- Email Message record - Sentiment section.
- Entity, Individual, and Contact records - Most Recent Email Sentiment and Most Recent Email Sentiment Date fields.
There are also two report types for email sentiment:
Client Email Sentiment by Member: A list containing the Most Recent Email Sentiment of each member within a Client record, grouped by Client Segment and Name.
Key Entity Email Sentiment Last 90 Days: All Key Entities that have an email with sentiment data from the last 90 days. Includes a bar chart grouped by Most Recent Email Sentiment.
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