Dynamics Planet

Introduction

With this post we are going to introduce the first family of our products for Microsoft Dynamics. We will describe several approaches and technologies that will be useful for the user in perspective of Outlook Integration/Synchronization and Microsoft Dynamics NAV CRM area.

MS Dynamics NAV Web Services or the History of Innovation

After Microsoft Convergence 2007, we were very interested in the new exciting technology from Microsoft Dynamics – web services. Having tested them, we can say that although there are some exceptions, Outlook can be integrated with any Microsoft Dynamics NAV (Navision) form or entity. Our team can even perform some Dynamics NAV logic from MS Office Outlook side. Unfortunately, the release for this technology has been postponed, but not our desire to share new exciting possibility.

So, we are converting our solution to work directly with MS SQL Server so that it is possible to use the integration with previous versions of Dynamics NAV (Navision).
For the MS Office Outlook side we have found two great points for the Integration: REGIONS and ADD-INS. We will talk about Add-Ins in this article. REGIONS will be the part of other solutions and corresponding article for you.

Outlook Add-In

Add-In is a classical way to extend the MS Office applications. We can extend any Outlook form class or create a new one to enhance the functionality. As for beginning, we think it should be really handy to use NAV Customers as recipients while composing a new letter in Outlook. By using the customer list panel, the user can easily find and add any customer from NAV to the recipient list.

Clicking the No. link, the user will get the requested Customer Card window opened in Microsoft Dynamics NAV (Navision). Move over, we are planning to extent this add-in with the possibility to add the selected customers to the message body or as attachment, and to filter the customer list by different parameters.

MS Outlook compose window

MS Outlook compose window and Microsoft Dynamics NAV window displaying the requested customer card

Your Benefits

Having implemented the described functionality, you will get a new way to interact with the customers (also vendors or any other contacts) by having them in Outlook New Mail window. Find the necessary contact group using the filters and create a mail for thw whole group. Another upcoming feature is to select the range of customers to be added to the message body if the user wants to send customers’ details. Also, the user can easily open the needed customer card in Microsoft Dynamics NAV.