Keeping sales communication up to date is one the most important aspects of a salesperson’s job. If your organization uses Dynamics 365 for Sales, you can track emails from clients, vendors, leads, opportunities, etc. right from Outlook and those emails will automatically sync up to the associated record in Dynamics 365 . This option is available so long as you have a license of Office 365 that includes the desktop version of Outlook and a license of Dynamics 365 Sales and/or Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Your Partner or administrator will need to make sure your organization is set up to synchronize mailboxes with server-side synchronization and your user will need to have the right security privilege assigned.

What happened to the Dynamics 365 add-in for Outlook?

As of October 1st, 2020, the Dynamics 365 COM Add-in for Outlook has been deprecated. Organizations that continue to use it, will find it difficult to use. The good news is that the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook is the direct replacement to the COM add-in. The new app is built on the unified interface meaning it is much more responsive than its predecessor and is able to automatically adjust to any screen size including mobile.

How it works

In this example, we’ll track an email to a lead, however you can track the email to any entity in Dynamics 365 including contacts, accounts, service cases, etc.

First, navigate to the email you want to track and click the Dynamics 365 icon.

Once the Dynamics 365 pane opens on the right side of your screen, enter the name of the lead. From the dropdown menu, select the lead’s name. For a moment it will say “Tracking Pending.” Once the email has successfully synced to the dynamics 365 system, you’ll see “Successfully Tracked” with details about the lead you selected.

Deploying the app

Before deploying the new app, we recommend disabling the COM add-in. To do so from Outlook, select File, Manage Add-ins. Next, select the Dynamics 365 row and click the minus icon. You can check out Microsoft’s documentation on this process here.

To deploy the app, check out Microsoft’s documentation for step-by-step instructions. They provide processes for admins to push the app to all Outlook users as well as instructions for individual users to add the app themselves.

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