I'm tasked with creating an Outlook form that will be used to communicate rate changes to our customers, and ask for their approval. The body of the email must have some fields that are required by the sender, such as customer name, and new rate. And the email must have an approval button or similar from the recipient. Its a relatively basic workflow
As I'm researching Outlook forms, I discovered this might be better suited for Outlook templates instead. But I'm new to this, and I'm not sure the difference between the two.
Any help or advice would be much appreciated!
Custom Outlook forms should be displayed on both sides of communication if you really want them working correctly. It is very inconvenient, so this feature is not really used nowadays.
Instead, you may consider using the MailItem.VotingOptions property which returns or sets a string specifying a delimited string containing the voting options for the mail message. This property uses the character specified in the value name, sList, under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\International in the Windows registry, as the delimiter for multiple voting options. As a result the recipient will see possible options to choose on the UI.
When the response comes back you may check the MailItem.VotingResponse property which returns or sets a string specifying the voting response for the mail message. This property is usually set to one of the delimited values returned by the VotingOptions property on a reply to the original message.
And the third solution is to develop a COM add-in which can handle custom data and provide a convenient UI for voting, for example, a custom form region can be developed for that. Again, this solution, like custom Outlook forms, requires installing the software on both sides of communication.
Related
I'm using Flask-Mail to send email notifications for events and currently I'm encountering a problem where if two emails of the same subject end with the same thing (which is a rather niche circumstance, but definitely necessary to consider nonetheless), the ending part of the second email will be collapsed by certain mail clients (gmail, for example) that think it's a sign-off or signature or whatever. How do I prevent this?
Currently what I'm doing is generating a random sequence of letters and putting it in a <span style="display:none">...</span> and appending that to the email so the client thinks it's a different footer, but that feels really hacky and I want to know if there's a proper way to do it.
After doing some research, it does not seem as though gmail gives you an option to turn this off. All of the articles written on this topic suggest making your footer unique, which is exactly what you are doing.
Furthermore, this option means that the content of the email does not change at all. This seems to be the best solution.
There is an option in Gmail which allows you to turn off conversation view.
How the grouping occurs is:
The subject must be similar
The sender must be a part of the thread OR in-reply-to must be used
Now to save space, Gmail condenses texts that are same, which is what you see. If you want to turn off conversation view in desktops just navigate to setting -- > generals (tab) for desktop and use the radio button select and press save.
If you are after other devices check this link out.
We are trying to automate a few things in CRM and I have an idea about how to go about it while still allowing customizations from the Process section in CRM Settings.
The problem: We receive a lot of E-mails from an account that are added to a Queue. This queue fills up faster than we can clear it. Most of these E-mails have a standard format and the user only has to read a few lines of the the E-mail body to figure out what to do. There's a total of 6 different workflows that the user would do. These haven't been implemented.
Reading the documentation of CRM, I figured that I would need a custom Plug-in that would parse the E-mail body, and trigger a workflow in CRM according to the values in the E-mail. I also need some of the values that the E-mail contains to be passed to the workflow. I already have the Plug-in setup to do this.
The problem I run into is creating a process which takes in custom parameters passed over by the Plug-in I created. I need to access these values in the front-end (one of the Processes in CRM Settings). Is this possible? If not, is there another way to achieve this?
Is there a reason you used a Plugin to kick-off this automation instead of a Custom Workflow (which is a Process)? You could perform the parsing of the E-mail inside your Custom Workflow, and use its InOutArgument properties to pass values into subsequent child workflows.
Definition: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg327984(v=crm.5).aspx
Sample: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-au/library/gg334455(v=crm.5).aspx
I'm working on a plugin for IBM Lotus Notes. I need to change content of an email right after user clicks 'send email' button, before the email is actually sent. I have searched APIs of Lotus Notes but can't find a workaround. There is a library named com.ibm.notes.mailsend in folder /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/framework/shared/eclipse/plugins. But I can't find any document related to it on Internet, and have no idea how to capture event about sending email. Does anyone know how to implement the function that I need? Thanks.
Update: Thanks Richard. Basically I've figured out how to hook email sending. But I also need to make an option that user can set differently for each individual email. From my understanding, email known as message is stored in Mail File database before being sent. How to 'add flag' to the message? Thanks.
The way to hook events in Lotus Notes is with the Notes C API's Extension Manager routines. The general strategy for hooking mail send operations is to set up a hook on EM_NSFNoteUpdateMailbox. This can be done on either the Notes client or the Domino Server. On the server side, if your processing is non-trivial, you run the risk of slowing down Domino if you try to do all of the work in your hook, so the strategy most people adopt is to have the hook code change the status of the message to "On Hold" and then signal a separate server task to take over the work. That way the hook can return and the separate server task can take whatever time is needed before resetting the status of the message so that normal routing will take over. You can find documentation here.
For server-side processing only, there are two options that will allow you to write your code in Java instead of C. One is an OpenNTF project called TriggerHappy that allows you to write Java Agents that are fired when some boilerplate hook code is triggered, and the other is the OpenNTF version of the Domino OSGi Tasklet Service (aka DOTS), which allows taskets to be fired in response to EM events. Note that there is an IBM-supported version of DOTS that is shipped in Domino 9 "Social Edition", but my understanding is that it does not include the EM event support.
Updated for additional info requested...
In order to add a flag to each message that can be read by the code that runs in your hook, you need to modify the mail template that is used in the users' mail files. You will need permission from the Domino system administrators to do this, and to be blunt: this is not something that Domino adminisrators like to do because it makes their job more difficult when they are upgrading Domino versions. There are many ways you could modify the template, but the point of all of them would be to add a new hidden field to messages which would serve as a flag for your hook code. If the field exists, your code would do the changes to the content that you need, otherwise it would leave the content alone. One possible way to do this would be by adding a shared action containing a formula to set your hidden field (that formula is just something like FIELD myFlagFieldName := "1";) and then you can add that shared action to the Memo form. Users would press the action button any time they want to trigger your code. The admin would need to maintain backup database containing your shared action and re-add it to the mail template after every upgrade and then re-add it to the new template version's Memo form. Of course there are other ways as well, some that are more friendly to users but harder for admins to deal with, and vice versa.
Aside from the visual splendor of HTML emails - links are the only thing keeping me from sending plain text emails. They are much simpler for users at times and reduce bandwidth by over 50%. However, forcing my users to copy/paste or (* shiver *) type the URL from the plain text email is not acceptable.
However, it seems like many services such as gmail and hotmail are converting URLs into HTML links. If that's true, then for some lighter emails I could finally switch to plain text (in certain cases) without bothering anyone.
Anyone know what percentage (or what systems or clients) convert text URLs into clickable links?
Some users access via the web (Hotmail/Yahoo/Gmail) while others use clients (Outlook/Thunderbird).
All email progams I know make links clickable, web-based and normal ones.
You should consider putting the links at the end of the mail, and use "[number]" to refer to them:
You should really visit PEAR[1] and friends, PHP[2]!
[1] http://pear.php.net/
[2] http://www.php.net/
That frees you from problems with longer URLs within the text, and it keeps the text readable.
You must not forget one simple fact and that is every mail client make this configurable. So I for one have the option of reading / sending html emails but I don't do that. So it's totally irrelevant how many mail clients support this, the relevant question is how many users have this enabled.
We're programming a Testing Web Application for a University in ColdFusion with a MS SQL Backend.
Right now we have to manually take faxes sent to our fax machine and then find the account they are related to and input the info (the actual fax has to be found in a filing cabinet if we ever need to reference it again). What I would like to do is create a way for someone to fax to a certain number and then the fax be sent to an email account we specify.
If that worked properly we would need a way to get the email, store it somewhere on our servers and then link it to an account. The linking process would probably have to be manual and we are ok with that, but an easy way to view all the faxes sent to that email in our ColdFusion application in PDF form (searchable by the name we assign it) is what we are mainly looking for, so that we don't have to get the faxes on paper and file them by hand.
Is there a way to accomplish this? Preferably not through a paid service as we can program almost anything we need ourselves.
Hmm... have you tried services like eFax?
Why reinvent the wheel? Services like eFax and jConnect (there are several others, just Google "electronic fax service") are affordable and do half of what you are trying to do. Save yourself the effort and just spend a few bucks. You'll probably find out, too, that it will cost you less to just pay for the service than it would cost you to pay the developer to write the software.
So after you bite the bullet and sign up for an electronic faxing service, you just need an email account for it to send to, and to use CFPOP to check the inbox and download the attachments. The rest is a piece of cake.
From the sounds of it, I have built something identical to this faxing setup with Coldfusion.
After a few trials and errors I found best way to go is:
1) DIGITIZE INCOMING FAXES: Have all faxes either sent to an email address you can check via CF, or a network folder you save them on, which you can check with CF. You can absolutely keep your fax number and simply call forward incoming calls to your digital fax number.
2) PROCESS INCOMING FAXES When you find a new fax, it is best to process it and make a record of it. I store things like the file name, dig up the fax number it came from, check it against a list of known numbers, and have a routing table (in case it needs to go to someone).
3) PRINT AND ROUTE FAX Auto printing a document once in CF is possible via CF as well.
As for tables, I keep one to store each fax. I store the fax itself in a blob as well. Easy to replicate and move around, no big performance hit. I keep another table to store a list of incoming number profiles (like a caller ID table) to relate the number to a customer. I keep a table for routing rules, if an email comes from here, send it here. Last, but not least, if you have to manage multiple phone numbers, you can create multiple incoming profiles and file them.
Once you have each fax stored in the DB, you can do a lot with it and file/index/ store it digitally how you like. CFDOCUMENT will display disk based PDFs.
I ended up having to program something like this for custom routing options. It is possible to auto link items to certain files/folders/projects if you like as well with CF.
If you need to know anything else, ask, or we can discuss it off line if you need to keep some details private.
Agree with Adam. Don't create a bunch of problems for yourself - you'll save a lot of money and nerves by just using the existing service.
On the topic: I use Popfax and I kind of like it. It's comfy, gives you opportunities, discounts, contests and a lot of stuff you'd like if you'd be interested in. It's cheap (at least, 100% cheaper than your own software) and you can use it not only on PC, but also via mobile phone