Business Central 2020 Wave 2 Enhanced Email Capabilities – How to setup

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:

All of the documents shown will now have the “From” address of accounts. This means a contact is more likely to reply directly to this group email rather than a direct contact 👍

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

Search for “Set up Email” and cycle through the wizard page to the one shown (page 2), choose the shared mailboxes option. Note that if you’re not a user with the SUPER permission assigned you will need a new permission set called EMAIL SETUP which is available in the main list.

Add the details of one of the shared mailboxes from the Office 365 admin centre. Finish the wizard and test the connection. Repeat this step for the other accounts that you need.

Once you have added all the accounts if you search for “Email Accounts” you can see all of the available ones to work with. Note that the legacy SMTP connection will be created for you already and it will be the “default”. There is an action to reassign the default available from this page as well as testing the accounts or composing a none document related email with that account.

The next area of interest in this page is under the “Navigate” tab where you can see email activity with that account from BC and which “Email Scenarios” are assigned to the email account.

Simply choose the documents you want to be sent from that email account

From that point onwards your chosen account will be used for that document. Any previous email dialog screens have been replaced with this one. If you have email layouts setup they will work too.

On the role centre you will notice a new activity cue. The draft cues means that users are asked to save as a draft or to discard the email – much like a regular email experience.

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:

Would have been nice if the “Attach File” option let you search documents stored in BC but that is currently not the case. Right now that will let you choose a file from a locally accessible location.

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