The Outlook Add-in for Dynamics NAV 2017

Recently, Encore hosted an event: “What’s New in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017”. We presented the best new Features in Dynamics NAV 2017, including the Dynamics NAV outlook Add-in. enjoy!

Video will start playing at the correct point in the presentation.

Transcript:

So the first thing I want to look at is what’s called the Outlook add-in for Dynamics NAV. So we’ll take a look at that. So I have Outlook loaded here. No, I need to do something first. So I’m gonna login into an email as a customer…

Trevor: Okay, so really, I’m the customer right now, and I’m writing an email saying, you know, I want a quote for 10, let say, bicycles. I’ll keep it simple for now. As a user who’s using NAV, I get an email for my customer. Take a minute to come in…So there’s my email and the first thing we can turn on, the NAV box within Outlook today. Okay.

So because it recognizes that contact, it’s gonna present me with information directly in my mail about that particular customer. So a typical office worker loses 40% of their productivity switching between apps. So when you think of getting a question in your inbox about, “Hey, this invoice seems wrong. Can you tell me why they’re charging it \$12?” You would go from your Outlook, you’d go into your NAV, you’d search for AR Receivables, to get the information.

So right here, I can really get all that information. All these blue things are hyperlinks, drill downs. I’ve got a lot of information on what’s happening on my customer. You know I can drill down. I can go directly all the way to the invoice, if I need to. I can show that actual invoice, I can drill right through this much like you’re used to in NAV today.

And because it’s a customer, it’s presenting me some options related to a customer. If it was a vendor, I’d have a different set of choices here, create a purchase order, etc. So I’m gonna go ahead and create that quote form. And it’s all the header information filled in for me, right? It’s nice and easy, and I’ll just type B-I for bicycle, it picks that up, and he wanted 10. I’ll put 10 in there. And the next thing I’m gonna want to do is send in an email saying, “Hey, here’s…”Did I do a quote or an order? I can’t remember, hopefully, I did a quote. Yeah, I did because that’s…

So I’ll send that quote out, and it’s gonna prepare the email for me. You see this little template sitting here. Some of you in 2016 might have known that you can now create most of your forms like quotes, order acknowledgement directly in Word. So it used to be hard to write and modify those reports. Today we can do them in Word. So this is just a Word template that somebody’s created in NAV that says use this template when I send a quote. So it puts all the nice detail there, and behind there is the report, which is also just a report that was created by a user or modified by a user in Word. So it sets all that information up for me, and I can go ahead and send that out.

I’m gonna head back to the customer, and maybe I should force that email to go right away, just a sec. So I’ll send that email out. I’ll head back to the customer and I’ll wait for that to come back. So there’s that quote that just came across. I’m gonna go ahead and say, you know, “Great, like the price, add two bikes, and send me the order conformation.” So send that over. I’ll go back and be my NAV user again…

So there’s that document coming back, and you see this link here, it’s recognized that this email is referring to something to do with a document in NAV, whether it’s an invoice or purchase order or a quote. So I can actually open it up right there. And what it wants me to do is add two. And make an order out of it…

So I can just convert it over and maybe again I want to send it out, email him a confirmation of that. That’s gonna do the same thing we saw earlier. It’s gonna put the template information in the quote. So when you think of your operational roles, sales, customer service, purchasing, if you do a lot of interaction with your customers through emails, you can now do that work almost exclusively within the framework of Outlook in relationship to your ERP or financial system.

So, you know, we started several years ago bringing those two products closer and closer together. Now I think that the wall is down completely between those productivity tools that you use a lot during your day and those business solutions, those ERPs. So that’s the first thing I wanted to sort of walk through. We can go further. We can actually, you know, edit the customer in here, change a phone number. All of those things gonna happen directly in Outlook. I just gave you the tip of the iceberg in terms of types of things you can do from there.