How to work offline with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Experience apps

The ability to work offline is essential for a consultant, salesperson or anyone who is constantly traveling to meet clients, customers or working remotely. With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Experience apps, viewing contacts, adding notes, editing records, and automatically synchronizing data into the system once online, can be done offline - with the right knownhow.

How can you enable your team to work offline? There are two ways to work offline with Dynamics 365: using a mobile device or the Dynamics 365 app for Outlook client. 

Microsoft allows administrators to configure the system on mobile devices, granting users access to significant data while offline. And the Dynamics app for Outlook provides full Dynamics capabilities, similar to working online. Before you begin to work offline in Dynamics 365 for Outlook, make sure to configure the offline settings:

File > Dynamics 365 > Go Offline

Once you are ready to go online choose:

File > Dynamics 365 > Go Online

Here are three ways to enable working offline with Dynamics 365:

Customize synchronization filters

Customizing synchronization filters helps define the datasets for users or an entire organization by activating, deleting, or deactivating filters. For instance, certain Dynamics 365 databases may become quite large, so working offline doesn't guarantee that all the data is copied to the system. Instead, the Dynamics 365 app for Outlook client provides offline synchronization filters that assist in determining which subgroups of the database are transcribed to the offline database. Using offline synchronization filters adds better performance and quicker synchronization. So, saving the customized and configured data allows modifications of the offline synchronization filters and simplifies access to the data needed while offline.