Enhanced Email Functionality

Emails! People write emails every day. In 2019, it’s estimated 293 Billion emails will be sent and only 45% of that will be spam. Email functionality is something that has been unloved in D365 Customer Engagement for several years/versions but in the last year or so, we have had a couple of updates. These include a rich text editor, email preview and email engagement (tracking delivery, opening of emails, opening of attachments) and it looks like it’s not stopping. The 2019 Wave 2 releasing this October brings some more love to emails, popout/inline creation. Let's take a look at this new feature, available in preview now!

To get started, again if you are reading this before October 2019, refer to my previous article on turning on the 2019 Wave 2 preview. To turn this feature on, you need to navigate to the Sales Hub in your Apps -> App Settings -> Enhanced Email.

Once this is switched on, you now have this functionality in any record with the Timeline control switched on and entities enabled for email. Navigate to a record and press the + button in the timeline and choose email. You will now get a popout window so you can compose an email in the context of the record you are working on.

This allows you to refer back to the record you want to compose the email about. Getting relevant details about an Account for instance, checking the last time they were contacted, details about open Opportunities, Orders or Quotes, credit limits etc.

You also have the ability to minimise, close and maximise the window, giving you a lot of versatility.

Historically you had to have multiple tabs open to refer to the data or just remember. A small feature is very powerful for users. One functionality update I would suggest, the ability to move the window around better. At the moment it is locked to the right hand side of the screen, which allows users to move around any entity and records within the system, but it limits the real estate on the screen as most of the content is in the centre or right, so maybe a button to swap the side of the popout would be useful. In fact, I think it’s such a good idea, I suggested it here and if you think it’s a good idea, please vote for it.

Ciao for now!