Integration overview
Email is where many business transactions start and end and is an essential integration capability of the platform. The Microsoft Dataverse works at the server level with Microsoft Exchange as well as other email servers to allow sending outbound emails that originated as email activities in Dataverse. These activities are tracked against Dataverse data keeping communication in one place. When using Microsoft Exchange, you can also choose to enable bi-directional synchronization of email, appointments, contacts, and tasks. When you are using other POP3 email servers, only email is synchronized. This synchronization allows, for example, an appointment created in Dataverse to show up on the users Microsoft Exchange calendar.
Users also have available Outlook integration to access Dataverse data in the context of the Outlook application. Using this integration, the add-in creates an email activity that is connected to the current email they are viewing and associate it with data in Dataverse. This includes the ability to create necessary records like the Contact, Account or Opportunity without leaving the Outlook application. This integration is surfaced as a customizable model-driven app, that is accessed from within the Outlook application as an add-in. We will learn in this module how to customize this app.
It is also possible to enable folder tracking which can automatically promote emails into Dataverse; this is when enabled users can copy an email into the designated folder and have a copy of it automatically saved in Dataverse. Each folder can be configured to map to a related Dataverse record. For example, if Contoso was a major client of yours, you could have a folder and copy all emails regarding them into it. Dataverse would create an email activity with a copy of the email and make it available anytime you looked at Contoso data in Dataverse. This activity would show in the timeline on the record with all other customer activities.
The integrations with email and Office tools are all about allowing users to do their work from where they want and either bringing the Dataverse data to them or the tools into model-driven apps; giving them the choice of where they want to work.