Good morning all,
I’m new here as will become patently obvious with my lack of knowledge so I hope you’ll bear with me.
I work in Higher Education and we are in the process of changing our enquiry management system to Dynamics 365 CRM. The choice of product has been decided way above my pay scale, I am not a D365 expert, but am the SME on our current system.
The product is being supplied by a third party company who are skinning out of the box D365 Customer Service and enhancing it to suit our business needs.
We’ve had the first sprint delivered and are in the first testing phase. This is our first chance to pick up some basic functionality issues and we have noted that on a Contact you can click on the email address or email icon to open Outlook in a separate window.
This is somewhat undesirable because we want all contact to take place within the timeline, be it via a Case, a new email, a response to an email etc.
However, the developers/suppliers have told us as the is OOTB it is an enhancement to disable the address and icon and will charge us (there is some suggestion it is very difficult to do and requires substantial work).
My google-fu initially suggested this was actually a simple thing to turn off in system settings, but subsequent searches suggest otherwise.
We are at an interesting point in the delivery of the system and are having some difficult conversations with the suppliers about what we expect and what they have delivered. Again, above my pay scale, but my current lack of knowledge on the general customisation of MSD365 means I’m not in a position to say much.
Can anyone here help?
Hi, from my knowledge there is no system setting to disable Outlook opening when clicking on an email field. However, if you setup email tracking the emails will get tracked to the Timelines if an email is sent or received directly out of Outlook so this would solve your issue. If you do not want to implement email tracking you could do the below but I would recommend going down the email tracking route.
(1) Create a new email field with a Data Type of text so there is no integration back to Outlook
(2) Place the new email field on the form and hide the default email address field
(3) Create a Business Rule to copy the email address from the new field to the default email field to ensure data integrity is kept.
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Hello,
You’re right that Dynamics 365 works with Outlook. You can click on an email and it will open in Outlook. But you can change that if you want. There isn’t just a simple switch to turn it off. You will need to customize it. One way is to change the command bar for Contacts or Cases. You could hide the Send an Email option. This way, users won’t be able to open Outlook from Dynamics 365.
Another idea is to change the forms. You can remove the email fields or make sure they don’t link to Outlook. Plus, you can set up Server-Side Synchronization. This keeps all emails and messages in the CRM, so Outlook won’t open. It will also save any email chats in the timeline. If you need something more detailed, you could create a custom workflow. This would keep all communication within Dynamics 365 and stop Outlook from opening. It may take some work from a developer, but it’s doable.
In short, you can tweak Dynamics 365 to fit how you work, even if it’s not super clear in the settings. Also you can check some information about the Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Higher Education and Schools, it won`t be an easy process, but we all started at some point.
Hi,
Thanks for both the replies, much appreciated.
We’ve been in touch with the system developers and they are tweaking the email functionality which I think will happen via Server-Side Synchronization.
It’s all still in the Sprint stages but it’s good to be able to say we believe it should be doable.
