If you read over the latest changes shipped with version 17.1 you would have seen the enhanced email capabilities mentioned. This can be enabled early by checking out the feature management page:

Just doing this though doesn’t mean you can start to enjoy the new features straight away, there is some setup to handle. A lot of the required setup is described very well on the docs.microsoft.com site: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/admin-how-setup-email
However, that doesn’t always have all the steps in enough detail. The end goal of this functionality is to have dedicated email accounts for specific scenarios that need emailing from the system. Here is a configured list to illustrate where we want to end up:

Before getting started in Business Central go to the Office 365 admin centre and add shared email accounts for each of the scenarios that can be covered. Out of the box this includes documents based on sales, purchase, service and internal messages like approvals notifications (can be extended to cover more – save that for another time). These type of mailboxes therefore make sense:

The majority of the connection setup is done through a wizard where you either pick the current user account so you can send emails as your logged in BC user or choose one of the above shared mailboxes. The current user method is very simple so I will cover the shared mailbox







I’ve configured this in two separate tenants thus far (as of 09/12/20) and the experience has been fairly slick. The only issue I experienced was to do with an Exchange configuration where no Office 365 connector was in place. If you are repeatedly given a message in BC about not being able to access the “Set up Email” page jump over to the Exchange admin centre and see the “Connectors” which currently lives under the “Mail Flow” area:

Users are able to search for “Compose an Email” to access the email editor with no document scenario assignment:

A much richer experience overall. Look forward to seeing what others do to enhance this.