I have never used Microsoft OneNote that much, never really seen a need for it (I usually just have my notes in Word). So, when Microsoft announced that there will be a OneNote integration with Dynamics NAV last year I didn’t think that much about it. But when I finally tried it out myself I was very impressed. I saw a very usable tool for both capturing comments/files related to entities NAV and for doing company specific instructions for the different parts of the application.

The OneNote notes can be related to individual records or to a page in Dynamics NAV.

Notes that are related to a page can be accessed from each page under the help menu (or by Ctrl+Shift+F1). The intention of the page notes is to create company specific help notes and instructions (something like how to enter new items).

Notes that are related to records are accessed with the OneNote action item that already exists on the ribbons (or by Alt+F7). The intention of the record notes are to capture notes, pictures, movies, files, etc. related to the entity.

The nice thing with the OneNote integration is that when you click the OneNote page action it opens OneNote and resize Dynamics NAV to fit both of them on the screen next to each other, even if your NAV pages are maximized (at least that is what it is doing on my computer, think it is native OneNote functionality). Then when opening different records or scrolling through records in a list page the different OneNote’s are automatically displayed. Sweet!! 🙂

You can drag and drop files into a OneNote note, when doing this you get a dialog asking if you want to insert a copy of the file or link to it. Inserting files like this will allow everybody that has access to the Notebook to open the file. Watch out ZetaDocs! 🙂

If I get to pick between linking documents using the good old Links functionality or using OneNote my choice will be OneNote because I think it is more visible and the users do not have to worry about where the file you link to reside. If I get to pick between using the good old Notes functionality or using OneNote my choice will be OneNote because it is so much more than just text. Score; OneNote vs. Good Old NAV functionality, 2 – 0. 🙂

During implementations I always ask myself; how would I like to have it done if it was my company implementing Dynamics NAV? The answer in this case would be to utilize OneNote. Going forward I think I would recommend OneNote for both company specific instructions about how to enter data in Dynamics NAV and to capture comments and files relate to records such drawings and manuals for items, etc… Assuming OneNote is and option.

The setup where you define the OneNote notebooks are in the profiles, this itself makes it possible to have different instructions for different profiles. Also quite nice I think….

Note; you probably want to have those folders on a server that all users have access to and being backed up frequently.

Dynamics NAV then creates one OneNote file per record type in the defined folders.

The OneNote integration is easy to setup and easy to work with. I think it is a great addition to Dynamics NAV.