Dynamics 365 attachments, out of Dataverse and into an archive
Monday morning, the capacity email arrives again. Your Dataverse storage is near its limit, and the chart in the Power Platform admin center points at the usual suspects: the tables that hold attachments. Somewhere in there is a decade of scanned gift agreements, signed letters, and donor correspondence, each one attached to a note by someone doing exactly the right thing with the tools they had.
$2
per GB, per month
Dataverse file capacity add-on, at list
10x+
cheaper in ordinary cloud storage
the same file, outside Dataverse
0
changes for your users
the note keeps showing its attachment
The storage bill is the visible problem. The quieter one is worse: a scanned agreement attached to a 2014 note is invisible. Search cannot read it, retention does not govern it, and the next gift officer will never know it exists. It is a document of record, stored as an afterthought.
PaperlessZen™ addresses both at once.
Where the space actually goes
Dataverse measures three kinds of capacity: database, file, and log. Attachments land mostly in file capacity, which is the cheapest of the three, about $2 per gigabyte per month at list for add-on capacity. That is worth saying plainly, because much of what you will read on this topic still quotes the $40 database rate for attachments, and that math is out of date.
So the honest version of the cost story is modest: file capacity is not ruinous, but it is still many times the price of ordinary cloud storage, and when any capacity type tips into overage, the consequences are not just financial. Admins lose the ability to create, copy, or restore environments, and every tenant admin gets a weekly reminder email until it is resolved.
If cheaper storage were the whole problem, several tools exist that move attachments to a cheaper bucket, and they do that job well. We compare all four realistic responses, theirs included, in an honest four-way comparison. The question the storage tools do not ask is the one that matters for your documents of record: where should the file land, and what should it be able to do when it gets there?
What the managed solution does
PaperlessZen ships a managed solution for Dynamics 365. It installs like any other solution, adds a panel to your record forms, and makes no structural changes to your org.
Extract
The solution removes the attachment from the note and moves the file into your PaperlessZen archive. New notes and the existing backlog both qualify.
Render
The note still shows its attachment, served by the PaperlessZen panel. Users see what they have always seen.
Read and file
The archive reads every page, makes the words inside the scan searchable, and files the document on the constituent.
Show everything
The same panel lists every document for that constituent in one place: agreements, amendments, correspondence, and the files that used to hide on notes.
Extract
The solution removes the attachment from the note and moves the file into your PaperlessZen archive. New notes and the existing backlog both qualify.
Render
The note still shows its attachment, served by the PaperlessZen panel. Users see what they have always seen.
Read and file
The archive reads every page, makes the words inside the scan searchable, and files the document on the constituent.
Show everything
The same panel lists every document for that constituent in one place: agreements, amendments, correspondence, and the files that used to hide on notes.
The backlog counts
Extraction is retroactive. The attachments your team accumulated over years can be moved in bulk, which means this is not just a plan for future storage. It is a recovery project for the documents you already have. The scanned agreement on that 2014 note becomes a searchable, governed archive document, and the note never stops showing it.
Nothing to adopt
Gift officers keep opening the same records and seeing the same notes. There is no new tab, no second login, and no training campaign, for the same reason the documents panel works: it meets people where they already are. The difference is invisible to habits and visible in results, because the record now also shows the constituent’s whole document history.
The part storage tools skip
Moving a file to cheaper storage changes what it costs. It does not change what it is. A scanned agreement in a storage bucket is exactly as unsearchable as it was on the note, just cheaper.
Extraction into PaperlessZen changes what the file is:
- Search reads every page, so a phrase from a naming clause finds the agreement and the page it sits on.
- The document files on the constituent, next to everything else you hold for them, instead of hanging off one note in one record.
- Retention schedules, legal holds, and audit trails apply to it like any other document of record.
- Obligations hiding in the text, reporting dates, naming terms, pledge schedules, can be pulled out and tracked.
Attachment on a note
Occupies Dataverse capacity at Dataverse prices
Unreadable to search, invisible to retention
Findable only by the person who remembers the note
Document in the archive
The note still shows it; the record shows everything
Every page searchable, filed on the constituent
Governed: retention, holds, and a full audit trail
Access, governed in one place
Who can see an extracted document is decided by the roles and policies you set in PaperlessZen, not by folder permissions scattered across another system. Grant access in one place, revoke it in one place, and every view is logged. Because the panel is served by your archive, retention decisions and legal holds are enforced at the source.
And it is your archive in the plainest sense: PaperlessZen runs in your institution’s own cloud environment. The files leave Dataverse, but they never leave your control.
What week one looks like
Install the managed solution
It imports like any other solution and connects to your PaperlessZen server. No schema changes, no SharePoint provisioning.
Extract a pilot slice
Start with one team or one record type. Watch the notes keep rendering while the files become archive documents.
Search what was invisible
The words inside those scans are now searchable. Most teams find a document they had been living without.
Run the backlog
Bulk extraction works through the accumulated years at whatever pace fits. The capacity curve bends; the archive fills.
See it on your own environment
Book a 30-minute demo and we will walk the whole loop on real records: the extraction, the note that keeps rendering, and the constituent view filling in. If you are still sizing the problem, start by reading your own capacity report, then see how the Dynamics integration works.
Keep reading: every agreement your gift officers ever attached to a note, the Dynamics embed, without another tab, and why documents belong on the constituent record.
Frequently asked questions
Does anything change for the people using Dynamics?
No. The note still shows its attachment, rendered in place by the PaperlessZen panel. Users keep working exactly as before. What changes is underneath: the file now lives in your archive, searchable and governed, instead of sitting inert in Dataverse.
What happens to the attachments already in Dataverse?
They can be extracted in bulk, retroactively. Years of note attachments become searchable archive documents in one pass, and each note keeps showing its file. You do not start from zero; you recover the backlog.
Who controls who can see an extracted document?
The roles and policies you set in PaperlessZen. Access is granted and revoked in one place, on the server, and every view is logged. We do not claim to mirror your CRM security roles; we give you a single governed access model at the source.
Do you extract email attachments too?
The work we stand behind today is note attachments, which is where scanned agreements and signed documents usually live. If email attachments are your bigger concern, ask us where that stands when you talk to us. We would rather tell you plainly than oversell it.
Do we need SharePoint for this?
No. The managed solution connects Dynamics to your PaperlessZen server directly. There are no SharePoint sites to provision and no folder permissions to keep in sync.
Which plans include it?
The Dynamics 365 integration, including attachment extraction, is part of the Advancement and Institution plans. There is no separate license and no per-seat charge.