Microsoft CRM 3.0, SBS 2003 and Faxing

Ok, we have a customer that wanted to do a fax blast through Microsoft CRM to approx 10000 Leads.

The campaign setup typically creates these faxes as individual activities that need to be manually executed. Not a great option, as none of them (I quickly excluded myself as an option!!!) wanted to click through each one to get the fax sent.

Soooo, after some research I figured out a short term fix (below) and a long term fix (I'll post the CRM Workflow examples when I'm done).

Here's the 411...

Ok, I have a long term fix, and a short term fix for you.

1) I did an advanced search in CRM 3.0 to determine the 8K Leads we wanted, customized the view to have only the first,last and fax number.
2) I exported those names
3) I opened Outlook, clicked on Contacts, and created a second group called "Fax Leads"
4) I imported the contacts into that list, and made that a public folder.
5) I quit Outlook
6) I opened the 1 page word document we wanted to fax, and choose Print, and in the Wizard, had the option of picking a Address Book. Under Outlook, the public Fax Leads showed up with all the contacts. You'll have to shift click to select them all and then Click the "Fax To" to get them in the big list. Now I know that sounds intuitive, but any variation of that doesn't seem to work quite right (only a few get added, or 1 gets added---you'll see what I mean).
7) Fax Away!
8) Then, after a weekend of the fax machine running...I realized the customer BOUGHT the leads lists (I did the import, so I should have seen this coming), and the fax numbers didn't have a 1 in front of them. The SBS Fax software is VERY picky, and NONE of the Area Code Settings in the control panel worked.
This may not be an issue for you, but I had to follow this and redo steps 4 on.

The downside is that this doesn't get stored in the history.

Long Term

I'm working on a workflow that walks through the activities and does it in the background. We were in a hurry, and it was more important to get the faxes out...