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Microsoft Teams
What connects to what
Mail and calendar
The Business Central add-in shows the sender's customer or vendor card, open documents and balances beside an email, and can create a quote or invoice from it. Dynamics 365 Sales uses its own Outlook app and server-side synchronization to track mail and meetings against records.
- ✓Contact insights beside each email
- ✓Quotes and invoices from the inbox
- ✓Tracked mail against CRM records
Chat and collaboration
Paste a Business Central link into a chat and it expands into a card colleagues can read. Dynamics 365 Sales records can be linked to Teams channels so the account team shares files and conversation in one place.
- ✓Shareable record cards
- ✓Contact search from Teams
- ✓Channels tied to CRM records
Spreadsheets that post
Open in Excel exports any list with its filters, and Edit in Excel lets users change lines and publish them back through the Excel add-in, with Business Central validation still applied.
- ✓Journal preparation in Excel
- ✓Bulk price and item updates
- ✓Financial reports exported with formulas
SharePoint and OneDrive
Business Central can save exported files and attachments to OneDrive, and Dataverse apps can store documents in SharePoint folders per record, so contracts and drawings are not buried in personal drives.
- ✓Record-level document folders
- ✓Shared exports
- ✓Microsoft 365 retention policies apply
The setup work nobody mentions in the demo
Each feature has an administrator step that is easy to miss. The Outlook add-in has to be deployed for users or the whole organization through the Microsoft 365 admin center. The Teams app needs to be allowed by Teams policy. Access through Microsoft 365 licences has to be switched on in Business Central, and the permission set that controls what those users can see has to be chosen deliberately, because it applies to every Microsoft 365 user in the tenant.
Dynamics 365 Sales needs a mailbox approval step before server-side synchronization will run, and SharePoint document management needs a site structure agreed in advance. None of this is hard, but skipped steps are the main reason these features sit unused after a go-live.
Sign-in is shared too. Business Central, the Dynamics 365 apps and Microsoft 365 all use Microsoft Entra ID, so multifactor authentication and conditional access policies you set once protect all of them.
Getting it running in your tenant
- 1
Check the tenant
We confirm which Microsoft 365 plans you hold, how Teams and Outlook add-ins are governed, and whether Business Central or Dataverse already sits in the same tenant as your mailboxes.
- 2
Enable and secure
Add-ins, Teams apps and document storage are switched on with your administrator, with permission sets chosen to show people what they need and nothing more.
- 3
Show each team its three features
Sales staff learn the Outlook pane, accounts payable learns Edit in Excel for journals, and managers learn to share records in Teams. Short, role-specific sessions work better than one long demo.
- 4
Look at usage
A few weeks in, we check which features are used, fix whatever blocked the rest, and retire anything that is not earning its keep.
Everyday tasks this removes from the ERP screen
- ✓Looking up a customer's overdue balance before replying to their email
- ✓Copying an order number into a chat so a colleague can check it
- ✓Retyping a spreadsheet of journal lines into Business Central
- ✓Saving a signed contract to a desktop folder nobody else can find
- ✓Forwarding a report as an attachment that is out of date by the next morning
Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 questions
Do our Microsoft 365 users need a Business Central licence to see data in Teams?
Not for reading. Business Central lets users with qualifying Microsoft 365 licences view shared Business Central data in Teams once an administrator enables it and chooses their permission set. Anyone who creates or changes records still needs a Business Central licence. The admin setting and permission choice are part of our setup.
Can we keep using Excel for budgeting and journals?
Yes, and many finance teams should. Edit in Excel sends lines back through Business Central's own validation, so the data still has to be right before it posts. Budgets can also be exported, adjusted and imported the same way.
Does this work if Dynamics 365 is in a different tenant from our email?
Most of these features expect Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 to share one Microsoft Entra tenant. If they sit in different tenants, for example after an acquisition, several integrations will not work as designed. We confirm the tenant setup first and recommend the cleanest route if a tenant move is needed.
Where does Copilot fit?
Copilot features appear in Business Central, the Dynamics 365 apps and Microsoft 365, and some are licensed separately. They work best once the basic connections on this page are in place, because Copilot draws on the same data and permissions. Our Copilot page covers what each one does.
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