In my last blog post I showed a new feature of Articles in Dynamics CRM 2011, which was showing how to Customize the Article Form. In this blog post I will be showing another feature, emailing an Article directly from within outlook. This is a great feature because it means you don’t need to go into CRM at all to get the Article, you can just create the email and add the Article, and then send it straight from within outlook.
To insert an Article into an Outlook email, first you need to open a new email message in outlook. You will then notice that the Insert Article button is greyed out, this is because before you can insert an article, you need to Track the email in CRM.
Once you click Track, or Set Regarding, you will be able to click the Insert Article button. When you click Insert Article it will display all the recently used Articles, where you can easily reuse a previously used Article.
If the Article you want isn't in the recently used list, you can click More Articles, which will open the look up articles window allowing you to Search for an Article to use.
Once you have selected the article, click OK to insert it directly into the email message.
As soon as you have inserted the article into your email, it will be available in the recently used articles view the next time you go to insert an article into an email.
As you can see below, the Article is inserted into the email, and keeps in the format specified in the Article Template.
Once the article has been inserted into the email, you can click send and the article will be sent from Outlook. Sending Articles this way will save you time, as you can insert the articles directly from within outlook, and you don’t need to go into CRM to get the information required.