Hopefully, this isn’t news to any D365 F&O users and the new configuration has either been implemented or is in the process of being implemented, but as its been a few months since the deprecation announcement, we thought it would be worth bringing to the surface once again to try and avoid anyone being caught out.

Deprecation of the exchange email provider was announced in January this year (more info here). For clarity:

  • Deprecation – this is a feature that Microsoft no longer has under active development.
  • Removed – this is when a feature will be removed from the application and customers will no longer have access to it.

It is a lifecycle state applied to a feature that is becoming end of life because it is either no longer required, or a better alternative is now available. Most of the time a feature deprecation date is announced when an alternative solution is in place, with exceptions to this typically being where the feature is legacy and no longer required.

In terms of the exchange email provider deprecation, the Dynamics team recommend using Microsoft Graph for D365 F&O. I’ll quickly cover the setup steps here, although they are publicly available.

Pre-requisites

The user(s) performing the setup require System administrator in D365 F&O and Azure tenant administrator rights.

Azure Application Registration

If you are setting this up from scratch and Microsoft graph is not in use then a new application registration will be required.

To do this navigate to portal.azure.com and select ‘Entra ID’:

Select Add>App Registration:

Enter an application Name, set application access to your organisational directory only and select Register:

Important – take a note of the application (client) ID at this stage as you will need this later for the F&O setup:

Now that you’ve created the Entra ID application, you need to set its permissions for the API that it will be handling. To do this select Manage>API Permissions and choose ‘Microsoft Graph’:

Search for the Mail.Send permission and select ‘Add permissions’:

The chosen permissions allows any organisational user to send emails using this connection, which is understandable considering the F&O application processes. Select ‘grant admin consent for your organisation‘:

The next step is create a new client secret. Select manage>certificates & secrets and choose ‘new client secret’:

Enter a descriptor for the secret and choose an expiry period, then click ‘Add’:

Make a note of the secret Value and then you’re all done on the Azure setup side:

D365 F&O Setup

Now over to the D365 F&O setup:

Jump into the Email parameters in System Admin> Email>Email Parameters:

If you have exchange configured from past setup then you’ll be warned about the deprecation:

Enable the Graph email provider and, if required, disable exchange:

Then for the final step, navigate to the Microsoft Graph Settings and enter the Application ID, saved from your Azure setup earlier, and input the secret value, also generated earlier, into the application Secret.

Test your connection to make sure everything is good. If you receive any errors then go back to revalidate the Application ID and secret values from earlier to ensure these have been input correctly.

You’re now good to go. Obviously if this is being done in a production environment then I suggest you follow your normal change control and configuration promotion to test before releasing to live, but as you can see its very straight forward so this shouldn’t be anything too onerous.

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