As I revised for the MB2-715 exam (Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Online Deployment) I am creating blog posts detailing all aspects of my revision. I hope these posts will aid anyone who is also revising for this exam. In this posts I will review integration with OneNote.
I guess the first question might be, what is OneNote? OneNote, as the name suggests is a product for taking notes. It is part of the office suite available in Office 365. Notes can be simple items of text but could also involve screen shots, audio or even video that relate to whatever subject is being covered. Meaning that OneNote offers a much richer interface than available with standard Dynamics 365 note taking. OneNote also supports co-authoring, allowing multiple people to collaborate on a single “document”. OneNote has a variety of clients to install locally, run on-line and even as apps on mobile devices.
OneNote uses a concept of notebooks, each notebook can have sections and pages, Just like a real notebook!
Note: OneNote also has a concept of section groups but this is currently not supported by the Dynamics 365 integration. Meaning you should just use sections and pages when integrating with Dynamics 365.
From the social pane in Dynamics 365 it is possible to open OneNote notebooks in the context of the currently selected record. You can then create and collaborate on OneNote documents using any of the supported clients. Notice that the OneNote tab appears in addition to the standard Dynamics 365 notes. Think of OneNote as an extension to the note taking capabilities in Dynamics 365 rather than a replacement.
OneNote integration uses SharePoint to store the notebooks. Because of this OneNote integration options can be found in the document management area of settings in Dynamics 365.
OneNote integration is available for Dynamics 365 Online and Dynamics 365 on-premise.
Prior to enabling OneNote integration each entity requiring the OneNote functionality must also already be enabled for document management.
An alternative approach to enable OneNote integration is to navigate to the entity in customizations and enable it in the communication & collaboration section.
If the OneNote tab is selected and a notebook doesn’t exist one is automatically created in SharePoint. Each record in Dynamics 365 will have only one notebook, which is shared across all users. (Hence the use of SharePoint rather than OneDrive for Business!) As sections are added into the OneNote notebook they will show in the navigation within the social pane in Dynamics 365.
Note: The level shown in the social pane is section. Within that section multiple pages may exist, to view the pages you’d need to open the section in OneNote.
Clicking on the section headings will open that section in OneNote.
If you review the documents option on the entity you will be able to see the files that makeup the OneNote being stored in SharePoint. This illustrates that SharePoint is required prior to integrating with OneNote. Also you should be able to see that the OneNote could be opened directly from SharePoint without opening Dynamics 365 if required.
If you remove a Dynamics 365 record the associated OneNote notebook will not be removed from SharePoint. If this needs to be removed it will need to be manually deleted from SharePoint.
By default, Dynamics will create a separate document location and a separate OneNote notebook for each record viewed. Should you wish to share one notebook across multiple entities this can be achieved by manually editing the document location so that it points to one shared OneNote notebook location.
As with SharePoint integration you need to be aware that Dynamics 365 access and SharePoint access (and therefore OneNote) are not directly linked. Permissions will need to be granted in the Dynamics 365 security model and SharePoint independently. You need to ensure users have access to both Dynamics 365 and SharePoint.
It is also worth understanding that SharePoint and OneNote configuration does not form part of the Dynamics 365 solution file. When moving from development to production environments any configuration will need to be repeated in both environments.
In this post I hope I have covered all of the major points needed for the MB2-715 certification. But as always I strongly encourage you to gain some real world hands on experience.
NEIL PARKHURST 
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