- The Teams app, the Outlook add-ins, and the Excel add-in each need an install before anyone can use them.
- Business Central's own approval engine notifies by email or internal note; Teams approvals come from a Power Automate flow.
- The OneDrive connection is ready for cloud tenants, but routing Excel and report output to OneDrive is a separate switch.
- Edit in Excel publishes changes back, works on Excel for the web and Windows, and covers most lists but not all.
A question that comes up in nearly every Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central demo, usually right after someone sees a sales order posted: what does this look like from Teams, from Outlook, from Excel? That ecosystem question is a large part of why finance teams already living in Microsoft 365 shortlist Business Central at all.
The answer is more interesting than a feature list, because these five integrations sit at different points on the effort curve. One is close to automatic on a cloud tenant. Three need an administrator to install something. One needs a licensing conversation. And the scenario people most want to see, a purchase approval landing in a Teams chat, needs a Power Automate flow rather than a checkbox. Knowing which is which before you commit to a go-live date is worth more than knowing the feature exists.
Teams: records as cards inside a conversation
The Business Central app for Teams comes from the Teams marketplace. Once it's installed, pasting a link to any Business Central record into a chat expands it into a compact interactive card. From that card, people can open more detail, edit data, and take action without leaving Teams.
There are three other pieces worth knowing. You can look up customers, vendors, and other contacts from the Teams command box, including their interaction history and related documents. You can push the other direction with the Share to Teams action on most Business Central list and detail pages, which sends a message and a link to a person, group, or channel. And you can pin a Business Central list or card page as a tab in a channel or chat, so a shared view lives where the team already works.
The prerequisite is straightforward and easy to miss when you're counting seats: every person who uses the Teams app needs a Business Central online user account. The card is not a read-only preview for unlicensed staff.
Approvals in Teams: the part that needs a flow
This is where demos and reality most often drift apart, so here is the mechanism.
Business Central has a built-in approval workflow engine. You set up approvers and amount limits on the Approval User Setup page, and a purchase document over a threshold you define routes to the right person. Microsoft's documentation is direct about how that person hears about it: the default version of Business Central supports notifications in email or as internal notes. Teams is not on that list.
Getting an approval into Teams is a Power Automate job. From a card or document page in Business Central, Automate > Create approval flow starts you on a template, and the Business Central connector carries dedicated triggers for exactly this: purchase document, sales document, vendor, customer, item, and general journal batch or line approval requests. Approvers respond from an Outlook email, a Teams adaptive card, or the Power Automate action center. That has been generally available since April 2023, and it's a well-trodden path rather than custom development.
Business Central's native approval workflows and Power Automate approval flows are separate systems, though any approval workflow template you build in Power Automate is added to the workflow list inside Business Central. Deciding which engine owns which approval is a design decision. Running the same approval in both is how you end up with two notifications and an argument about which one counts.
The cost question usually follows. Business Central includes a Power Automate use right for flows that work with your Business Central data, so an approval flow like this doesn't start with a separate purchase.
SharePoint and OneDrive: mostly connected, partly switched off
For Business Central online, Microsoft has already created the connection to OneDrive. The only requirement on the user side is that the person has opened OneDrive at least once. On-premises deployments need an administrator to configure it.
With that connection in place, most pages where files appear (the Report Inbox, and attachments on records) gain two actions. Open in OneDrive copies the file to a Business Central folder in your OneDrive and opens it. Share copies it to your OneDrive and shares it with other people, which is where the co-editing story starts: once a document is in OneDrive, Word and Excel behave the way your team expects.
Here's the nuance that catches people. A second set of behaviors, having Open in Excel, Edit in Excel, and report output automatically save to OneDrive and open in the browser instead of downloading to a device, is not on by default. An administrator turns it on through the OneDrive Setup assisted setup guide. If you demo Business Central on a tenant where someone already ran that guide and then go live on one where nobody did, the file experience will feel different, and it will look like a bug rather than a setting.
Outlook: two add-ins, and one environment each
The Business Central add-in for Outlook is really two smaller add-ins, and you can deploy either or both.
Contact insights surfaces Business Central customer and vendor information inside emails and calendar appointments, and lets someone create and send a business document such as a quote or an invoice to that contact without switching apps. Document view watches for a business document number in an email body and turns it into a direct in-line link to that document in Business Central, which is the small thing that quietly saves an accounting team a dozen lookups a day.
An administrator with the Exchange Administrator role deploys both through Centralized Deployment in the Microsoft 365 admin center, using manifest files that Business Central generates for you in an assisted setup guide. Individual users can install for themselves if that hasn't happened.
Two practical notes. The add-in is tied to a single Business Central environment; the environment name is written into the manifest at install time, so anyone who works across a production and a sandbox environment installs it again to switch. And after a successful deployment it can take up to 24 hours before users see the add-in, plus an Outlook restart. Build that into your go-live week rather than discovering it on the morning of.
Excel: viewing and publishing back are different features
Both live under the Share icon on list pages, and the distinction between them matters more than the names suggest.
Open in Excel exports what's on the page, respecting your filters, and it's a one-way trip. Edits you make in the workbook stay in the workbook.
Edit in Excel is the round trip. You change records in Excel and publish them back to Business Central. It's available on most lists but not all, and it requires the Business Central add-in for Excel, which an administrator can push out or a user can install from the Office Store on first use. The workbook and the platform stay in sync through that add-in, so there's no export file to reconcile and no import step to schedule.
Three limits worth writing down before you promise this to a team:
- It works with Excel for the web and with the Excel app for Windows, but not with Excel on macOS.
- When OneDrive is configured for system features, Business Central caps the exported workbook at 100 columns so the file stays viewable in Excel for the web.
- Filters mostly carry over, so the workbook has almost the same records and columns as the page, not always exactly.
Ask to see one of your real lists opened with Edit in Excel, changed, and published back, on the same kind of device your team uses. It's a two-minute demo that answers the macOS question, the column-count question, and the "is this list supported" question all at once.
Power Apps: extend the platform, then check the license
Power Apps reaches Business Central data and processes through the same Business Central connector that Power Automate uses, which makes it a reasonable way to put a purpose-built screen in front of people who should never see the full platform. A warehouse app on a tablet, or a small approval and lookup app inside Teams, are the usual first builds. Microsoft is also rolling out tooling and sample apps for this, currently in preview.
The licensing point belongs in the same paragraph as the capability. The Business Central connector is classified as a premium connector in both Power Apps and Power Automate. For Power Automate, the use right that comes with Business Central covers flows working with your Business Central data. For Power Apps, the people who use the app need Power Apps licensing of their own. That's not a large surprise if you plan for it, and an expensive one if you find out after the app is built.
What each one costs you in setup
| Integration | State on a new cloud tenant | What still has to happen |
|---|---|---|
| Teams app | Not installed | Install from the Teams marketplace; every user needs a Business Central account |
| Approvals in Teams | Not available natively | Build a Power Automate approval flow from a Business Central document page |
| OneDrive and SharePoint | Connection already created | User opens OneDrive once; admin runs OneDrive Setup for the Excel and report behavior |
| Outlook add-ins | Not installed | Exchange admin deploys both manifests; allow up to 24 hours, one environment per install |
| Edit in Excel | Available on most lists | Excel add-in installed; not supported on Excel for macOS |
| Power Apps | Connector available | Build the app; license the users for Power Apps |
What to turn on, and when
None of this redesigns a process. It removes steps from work your team already does: the lookup someone does in a second browser tab, the export and re-import that turns a spreadsheet edit into an hour, the approval that waits in an inbox nobody checks after four o'clock.
That's worth having, and it's also the reason to sequence these deliberately. Get the process right in the platform first, then decide which of these surfaces it belongs on. Turning them all on during go-live week gives your team a stack of new things to learn at the exact moment they have the least patience for any of them.
If you're evaluating Business Central and want to see these run against your own data rather than a demo company, bring us the two or three moments in your week where people are copying between systems. Those are the places where the ecosystem argument either earns its keep or doesn't.