Using Microsoft 365 Email Sync

Overview

Microsoft 365 Sync for email ensures that your firm has reliable access to a comprehensive history of email engagement, making it easier to understand client relationships deeply and ensure your employees communicate in a compliant way. 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 if the Microsoft 365 email sync has not been enabled. For information on enabling the integration, please consult our Enabling Microsoft 356 Email Sync article.

This integration works only with Microsoft Cloud. It is not compatible with Exchange servers on-premises or self-hosted Exchange servers.

• Integration Summary
• Using the Integration
  
  • Understanding the Sync Process
  • Viewing Synced Emails
  • Internal Emails Considerations
  • Suspicious and High-Risk Email Content
  • Compatibility with Practifi Protect
  • Sentiment Analysis

Integration Summary

Microsoft 365 Sync is a paid add-on feature. Please note that the number of users granted access must be the same as the number of licenses in your Practifi contract. Contact your Client Success Manager to discuss pricing in more detail and sign up for the service.

The Microsoft Outlook integration remains a great option for firms looking for a low-cost option, however, 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 the workload for your team.
• 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:

• Whenever employees send or receive an email, if their mailbox has been enabled for Microsoft 365 Sync, then it will be 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 on the Email and Alternate Email fields seen directly on Individual and Contact records or in Contact Point Email records related to them, meaning unlimited matching options.
• Matched emails appear in the Activity Timeline of the person in question, appearing alongside the other aspects of their comprehensive profile.
• When an email message includes CC'ed addresses, those CC'ed recipients who are matched to Individuals or Contacts in Practifi will have that email appear in their Activity Timeline.
• 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 enabling a new user for the sync service, we go back to the same point in time used when initially syncing the two systems, so that their message history has continuity with all other users. 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 and presents the user with lists of matched and unmatched emails alongside a range of useful filtering options, such as the dates the message was sent and synced. This can often be a useful way to understand how incoming emails have been synced to people in Practifi, as the layout best approximates what you’re used to seeing in your inbox.

For unmatched emails, the Relate to People action makes it easy to link those emails to Individuals and Contacts at scale. Simply select the emails you wish to relate and 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

Internal emails are ignored by the sync service. An internal email is defined as one where all the email addresses found across the To, From, Cc and Bcc fields are on internal email domains. Defining the set of email domains considered to be internal is done by the administrator when setting up the service.

Suspicious and High-Risk Email Content

Salesforce’s built-in reporting tool makes reporting suspicious and high-risk email content possible by providing the option to filter lists of emails based on the presence of keywords and phrases in their 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 at the same time. However, the encryption introduced by Practifi Protect prevents Microsoft 365 Sync’s record-matching logic from operating. this means firms cannot encrypt the below 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 and rates them as positive, neutral or negative. 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 who have an email with sentiment data from the last 90 days. Includes a bar chart grouped by Most Recent Email Sentiment.