Office 365 (O365) is the most popular business application in the world.  O365 is of course several applications – Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, Teams, etc.  It remains a vital application and revenue stream on which Microsoft will continue to invest, improve, integrate and protect.

Dynamics 365 Business Central (and NAV before it) has always found useful ways to integrate Office 365 into this ERP – e.g., extracting forms and allowing updates in Excel that when reloaded back into NAV/Business Central remains compliant with field level rules.

The idea of Digital Transformation is centered on the democratization of services to enable use across applications.  Microsoft is at the center of this with a fantastic Cloud ERP (not just Business Central but also Dynamics 365 for Finance & Operations) and the products making up O365 (along with Azure services, of course).

And, Microsoft realizes that some Dynamics 365 (D365) users – think AR/AP working with customers and vendors – will spend most of their time in Outlook; hence, D365 allows the user to remain in Outlook to conduct work by seamlessly anticipating and surfacing relevant user/company information and then replying with relevant D365 information (see bulleted list below) and sometimes updating D365 as well.

Business Insights – Context is important

The integration enables Outlook to surface relevant information about the client, vendor, or contact.

Contact Insights would reveal information related to:

  • Sales & Purchase Orders
  • Purchase Invoice
  • Purchase Credit Memos,
  • Sales Quotes
  • Sales Invoices
  • Sales Credit Memos

 

Creating New Documents – not just a read-only integration solution

This integration is not just dedicated to surfacing past transactions.  When an email arises, it might contain information – for example – to create a new Sales Order.

AI is embedded as well to improve the process; e.g., when creating a new sales order from within Outlook (yes, you can do this from within Outlook!), order line items are presented based on information contained in the email from which this sales order is triggered. This can speed the process and also improve the quality of the sales order itself as well.

See here for a short Microsoft Video on some of these features: Unlock efficiencies with Dynamics 365 Business Central + Outlook – YouTube