Hi Mike there are three ways for mail to be used together with the CRM
1: Using Outlook
2: Using an external tool the Email Router
3: Using internal “Server Side Sync” (between CRM and Exchange)
Option 1 is used for personally received emails, and require that the user have an active outlook session and CRM connection simultaneously.
Option 2 & 3 are mutually exclusive and basically cover the same functionality, as they provide either direct or indirect server to server synchronization of emails. Option 3 further includes task and appointment synchronization, which is a requirement in coming CRM updates.
Where Option 1 is protocol independent, option 2 & 3 both require HTTPS. This is a security decision deployed by Microsoft. Put to the point the Email Router will refuse to connect to the CRM server if its not running HTTPS, and the Server Side Sync is locked in regards to configuration of mail accounts unless HTTPS is used.
Now we are using Windows authentication with our mail profiles and using forwarding mailboxes,the OS is windows 2012 (not R2) for the CRM servers and Windows 2008 R2 for the Exchange 2010 at the moment, the goal would have been to offload the ssl from the CRM servers, but now we are looking at end to end ssl if there is not another way around the communication problems.
/Regards Craig