One of the most common requirements I have seen in business applications projects is the ability to receive and send emails directly from the main customer management system (e.g. CRM). A simple solution for this is to use Server-Side Sync to integrate Microsoft Exchange mailboxes with Dynamics 365 / Microsoft Dataverse.
By the way, this is the first post regarding this email topic, which I´ve broken down into a series of several short posts to describe different aspects including mailboxes, contacts creation, Automatic Creation Rules and conversations.
Carrying on with mailboxes, a common use case is to have a common mailbox to handle customers or prospects, so different members of your team can contribute and help at the same time. Additionally, you want this mailbox to be part of your CRM system, so you can contextualise these conversations and link them to other existing information.
The first thing that we need in order to enable this feature is to create a shared mailbox in Exchange admin center:
Once the Exchange mailbox is created, we create a queue in Dynamics 365 (CRM / Microsoft Dataverse / Common Data Service … 🙄) using the same email address:
Automatically a mailbox will be created in Dynamics 365 associated to the new queue:
In “Mailboxes”, you should find the mailbox link to the queue. “Server-Side Synchronization” should be assigned to the Incoming and Outgoing synchronisation methods.
Remember to click the following buttons: “Approve Email” and “Test & Enable Mailbox”. Once you can see “Success” status for incoming and outgoing emails, you are ready to start managing emails within your queue in Dynamics 365. In this case, I’m using the app “Customer Service Hub“, which is part of the Customer Service module. But you could create your own app as well.
As I’m using Microsoft Exchange in this mailbox, these emails are also tagged with the “Tracked to Dynamics 365” category:
Please notice this is the system information at the time of this post:
- Environment with Customer Service and Sales Enterprise Dynamics 365 apps enabled
- 2020 release wave 2 enabled
- Server version: 9.1.0000.25547
- Client version: 1.4.1809-2011.1
Feature image by Campaign Creators on Unsplash
@ramontebar 👨💻 