Improved email attachment experience in D365 Customer Service

Here is another set of features that kind of snuck into Dynamics 365 Customer Service without anyone noticing! At least I didn’t notice until I opened an email message in Dynamics 365 Customer Service and saw some different options available for me! I (or any other admin) didn’t need to enable anything, these features just showed up out of the blue! It’s hard to pinpoint which release wave these features belong to, as we had several improvements to the attachments experience back in release wave 2023, but there was also a mention of it in 2024 release wave 1. My guess is that the features I am discussing today are part of the latter. Before I dive into all the features related to these attachment enhancements, I wanted to mention that I noticed that even through these features are mentioned in the release notes as part of Dynamics 365 Customer Service, I noticed that they also showed up in other apps where I am using emails in Dynamics 365! This made me wonder if these enhancements will be available for other Dynamics 365 apps, so I spun up a new environment and only installed Dynamics 365 Sales. The features weren’t available there. But I was able to do a little configuration to make them appear there as well! I’ll go through the configuration steps in this article.

Viewing Attachments

Now let’s talk about all the cool features that are part of this improved attachment experience. The first thing I wanted to mention is the way we can view the attachments in an email. The default view shows the attachments with large thumbnails. You’ll notice it looks a look more refreshed, and it’s easier to distinguish the different file types. (Although I have to say I was a bit disappointed when I saw the power point thumbnail or lack thereof!) If there are a lot of attachments, we can use the back and forward buttons to scroll through them. You can also change the thumbnail view to a grid view.

The grid view you’ll see here is not like a ‘regular’ grid view in Dynamics 365. You’ll notice it has a column next to each attachment called ‘actions’ which allows users to delete or copy the attachment directly from the grid.
Another way to view the attachments and get more details related to them, is the export to excel function you are probably already familiar with. I was surprised when I opened the excel document to see that this didn’t only have the file names of the attachments, but also the file sizes in bytes, in case you weren’t aware, this is not a new feature as this was available previously. The ability to preview an attachment hasn’t changed, users can click on any of the attachments to do this, but there might not be a preview available, which means a local copy will have to be downloaded to view the file.

Adding Attachments

Besides viewing attachments, it is also a lot easier to add one or multiple attachments to an email in Dynamics 365 CX! We now have drag and drop functionality that allows users to drag files from a folder to an email message in Dynamics 365! That is definitely a lot faster than the ‘old’ way where we had to click the ‘+ Attachment’ button first, then navigate to the correct folder, from where we would select the files we wanted to attach to the email. This is a real time saver!
Another option here is to copy one or more attachments from a Dynamics 365 email, after which a user can copy the attachment(s) to a different email! Of course, the user would need to find the email with the attachments first, so that may take a little more time than we would want, so there is another option to accomplish this as well. When a user clicks on the ‘+’ button of the attachments command bar, they’ll see an option called ‘Attach from previous email’. When this option is clicked, a pop-up window will open up, showing attachments the user can choose from. It looks like these are attachments that are related to other email messages stored in Dynamics 365. NOTE: I am not sure if the attachments shown are from emails the user owns, or if it also shows attachments from other users as well.

Enable the new attachment control

As I mentioned earlier, it is possible that you’re not seeing these new capabilities on the email form in your environment. However, I was able to configure this functionality directly on the email form in my Dynamics 365 Sales environment! You can do this by following the steps below:
Open PowerApps by navigating to make.powerapps.com and select tables from the left navigation menu. We need to add this to the email form, so be sure to open the email table. Once the table is opened, click on ‘forms’ and select the form for which you want to enable this new control. (If you have multiple forms you can follow these steps for each of the forms). When the form opens, look for the attachments grid on the form. Once you select it, you should see the properties pane open on the left side of the form. Scroll all the way down until you see a section that is called ‘Components’, then expand this section. You’ll notice the ‘Subgrid(default)’ and ‘(Deprecated)Read-onlyGrid’ controls listed. Click on the three dots on the right side of the ‘(Deprecated)Read-onlyGrid’ control, then delete the component. You’ll notice that this action will delete both components. Click on the ‘+Component’ button and search for the ‘Attachments control’. If you don’t see it, then click ‘Get more components’ and search for it again. Once you see it, click on the dot on the left side of the component and click add. You should now see it in the ‘Add component’ window. Click on the component to select it and click ‘Done’. On the command bar of the form, click ‘Save and Publish’ to publish your changes, and enjoy the new controls! I hope you enjoyed this article! Be sure to check in again next week for a new article or subscribe here to never miss another post!