One of the showcase features of Dynamics 365 Business Central is the ability to use the product within Microsoft Outlook clients using Outlook add-ins. There are two add-ins that come out of the box with Dynamics 365 Business Central: The Contact Insights add-in and the Document View add-in.

From an email within Outlook, Contact Insights enables the user to go straight to the Contact, Customer, or Vendor Card that is associated to the sender or recipient of the email message. From there, information about the contact may be viewed or edited and documents may be created and sent directly in Outlook. Given an email that contains a document number within the body of the message, Document View enables the user to directly open that document within the context of the email message; from there, the document may be edited (if it is still a draft), posted, or emailed to the customer. Figure 1 shows the Contact Insights add-in opened inside of the Outlook web client.

That explains the default add-ins in a nutshell. But what happens if there is a scenario that is not supported by the default add-ins? That is exactly what this article is about – enabling new scenarios through new or modified Outlook add-ins for Business Central. To understand how to extend the existing Outlook add-ins or create new add-ins, we first need to understand how the Outlook add-ins work with Business Central. If you don’t care and just want to try creating an add-in yourself, feel free to skip to part two.

Also, the same steps apply to the Outlook add-in for Dynamics NAV, provided that your Dynamics NAV deployment uses either Azure Active Directory or NAVUserPassword as the authentication mechanism. For more information, see Credential Types for Dynamics NAV Users.