Possible? Linking Outlook email threads to NAV sales orders

Olof

Hello all,

I hope somebody can point me in the right direction.

Situation: 90% of our communication with customers on sales orders is done via email. Email at our office is Outlook 2010 and 2013. So a lot of info on a Sales Order is stored in individual Outlook users' mailbox. Information such as the original email-order from customer, his follow-up questions, our email back with answers, etc.

Is it somehow possible to store or link such email discussion threads to the relevant Sales Order in Navision?

If not, what best practices do others use in similar situations?

Thanks in advance for any thoughts

Regards,
Olof

tinoruijs

Which version are you on?
I've seen at a customer-site where they use NAV 2013 R2, they put a lot into notes on all kind of data.
Works fine if text is enough.

vremeni4

Hi,

I implemented something similar in NAV 2009 that uses Public email folder.
Customers send email to the public email folder NAV reads emails from there and creates a Task in NAV.
I used existing codeunitns and functionality used to Synch, NAV and Outlook.
In other words this is doable but not easy.

I hope this helps.
Thanks.

Olof

Thanks to you both for taking the time to respond. It gives us a lot of food for thought.

Sorry, I should have provided more info on our Navision setup:
Version: 3.70 (6.00.32012) (native database) with a technical upgrade to NAV 2009 R2

1. As we do not have NAV 2013 R2, I don't think we can implement the notes-suggestion but please correct me if I'm wrong. I would love to be able to create a large note field, the current note field in Sales Orders (next to order No.) cuts of every sentence at 50 characters. Is it possible to create such a large note field? Say total of 400 characters which visually is 4-5x higher than std field height?

2. Outlook Public Folders: that is our current thinking as better-than-nothing-solution. I.e. to have Outlook User 1, 2 and 3 save all email threads into new Public Folder instead of in their own private Outlook folders. So that everyone can search in all email threads regarding all Nav Sales Orders. No link to the specific Navision's Sales Order though. Given our NAV version, I'm do not think we have any sensible sync possibilities with Outlook

Regards,
Olof

vremeni4

Hi,

If you open "Marketing Setup" in NAV, there is a tab "E-Mail Logging".
In the field "Queue Folder Name" you have to setup a public folder name on Exchange Server.

In the background there are codeunits in NAV that will monitor incoming emails in this public folder and process them .
NAS is used to process this, in other words you use Navision application server to run a codeunti which will run the code to check if there is something in the Exchnage public folder. The email is read processes and moved from public folder to another.
This is implemented for Tasks in NAV you can just change the code to do this for Sales orders.
Take a look at the codeunits

Type ID Name Modified Version List Date Time Compiled Locked Locked By
5 5064 E-Mail - Logging No NAVW16.00.01 14/08/09 12:00:00 Yes No
5 5065 E-Mail Dispatcher No NAVW16.00 05/11/08 12:00:00 Yes No

I think functionality was available in NAV3.7.
Even if it was not you can just copy necessary objects from Cronus NAV 2009 into your database and use them.

I hope this helps.
Thanks.

Olof

Hello vremeni4,

That sounds interesting! I will look into it further and let you know what came of it!

thanks

mdPartnerNL

For this we use a solution "Documents - In & Out".

You can simulate this by dragging an email to a network folder, then in the order, open file links, and create a link to this file.

Olof

mdPartnerNL wrote:

For this we use a solution "Documents - In & Out".

You can simulate this by dragging an email to a network folder, then in the order, open file links, and create a link to this file.

Interesting you should mention this. It's one of the solutions we are going to try (file links).

After looking into all the suggestions, talking with our reseller and talking to our sales order department (what do you really, really need?) we are going to try the following first:
1. Using Edit/Links to link the incoming PDF from customers to a specific Sales Order. We never knew this functionality existed ](*,) or with all the personnel changes over the years this knowledge was lost.. So relevant incoming PDF's in Outlook will be saved in a pre-determined subfolder from which the NAV file links functionality will be used.

2. Create a new multi-line Notes field on the General tab of Sales Orders. Which can contain a maximum of 1024 characters. This allows our sales dept people to copy the most important text from customer emails into this field. Not ideal, but better than the existing NAV notes field which only allows for 50 characters before having to start a new line.

The above we are going to try for a few months to see if solves the requirements of sales people (or at least 80% solved). If the above proves to be insufficient, then we will look into more complex custom work to create some of the good suggestions out of this thread.

Thanks everyone for providing tips and suggestions!

regards,
Olof