Enhanced experience using email templates

In my last article I wrote about the new experience for creating email templates, and this week I am going to cover the enhanced experience end-users will have when adding an email template to an email message in Dynamics 365. This feature is also part of 2022 Release Wave 1 and has been generally available since April 1st of this year. It’s interesting to note that this feature is showing under Dynamics 365 Customer Service (agent experiences), but after I enabled this feature, I was able to use this functionality in other model-driven apps as well. Having said that, yes this is another feature that needs to be enabled before users can take advantage of it, so I will cover how to enable this and of course I will walk through the functionality as well!

Enable the enhanced experience

This seems to be a new way to enable features in Dynamics 365 and if you’ve read last week’s article, you’ll notice this feature is enabled the same way. To turn this on you need to navigate to make.powerapps.com and open the environment you want to enable this feature for. Open the solution for which you want to enable the enhanced experience. Please note you can’t do this in the default solution or in any managed solution. Once you open the solution, click on Add Existing (on the top of the window) then select ‘More’ and then click ‘Setting’. You’ll notice a window opening called ‘Add existing Setting Definition’. From here you will need to search for the ‘Enable the New Insert Template Dialog‘ setting.

Click on the setting and select ‘Next’ on the page. On the next screen you’ll need to click ‘Add’ to add the setting to the solution. Once the setting has been added to the solution you’ll need to select it and click ‘edit’ on the command bar. You’ll notice a side pane will open with the details of the record. The only thing you’ll need to change is the ‘Setting environment value’ on the bottom of the screen. Make sure you set it to ‘Yes’. Save the record and publish the solution.

Functionality

Once this functionality has been enabled for the organization, you’ll notice users will see a different dialog that opens when they click the ‘insert template’ button from within an email message. Below you can see an image of the comparison side by side. On the left side is the legacy dialog, and on the right side you can see the updated version.

Immediately you see that the view of templates on the left looks a lot nicer, and if you look very closely at the new dialog window in the new experience you’ll notice two buttons on the top right side of the window. The filter button allows users to filter the templates by entering information in the fields of the filter. In my example I am looking at email templates for a contact record and when I click the filter icon I can start typing words below the name, body, subject or description field to get a match. There is also a permission level field which allows me to filter email templates based on whether they are organization wide or an individual template type. Moving the cursor out of any of these fields will automatically filter the email templates based on a ‘contains’ type of search.
The button next to the filter icon is a drop down and allows users to visualize the list of email template in a different type of view. Users can choose to show the data in a list view, grid view or in a tiles view. I have to say I really like the tile view as it shows a pretty nice preview of the email template’s content in each tile! It’s important to note that the default view in the dialog can be configured by administrators. You can do this by navigating to ‘Advanced Settings’ and clicking on the ‘Administration’ tile. From there you’ll need to click on ‘System Settings’, after which the settings window will open. Click on the email tab and scroll down to the bottom of the page. you’ll notice the setting where you can select the default view.

Users will notice the search bar is still there, allowing users to randomly search for a template. This search bar was present in the legacy experience and I am glad it’s still there.
When a user clicks on any of the email templates on the left side of the screen, they’ll be able to see a preview of the content on the left side of the dialog. This was also something that was available prior in the legacy experience. The difference here is that below the preview window, users will see the description related to the email template, giving them information on when and how the template should be used. I like the addition of this as this can guide users to the right template at the right time.

Lastly, when a user clicks on an email template from the dialog, a check mark is shown which indicates the template has been selected. When a user hovers their mouse over the selected template, they’ll notice the mouse icon has changed to a magnifier icon.

When you click on the template with this icon, you’ll notice the template is now shown in full screen. Users can quickly go through and review the templates by clicking the previous and next buttons on the top right side of the screen. Where is also an information icon which will show additional details including the description of the template when clicked. When the user clicks ‘Select this template’ on the top left side of the screen, the template will be added to the email.

Conclusion

Microsoft keeps stepping up their game! Not just by adding new functionality but also upgrading existing experiences! If you haven’t turned this feature on, I would recommend doing so as soon as you can so that your end-users can take advantage of the new experience! I hope you found this article informative! Be sure to check in again next week for a new article or subscribe here to never miss another post!