Writing Emails That Generate Teamwork-Context

Using the Special Email Handling

This section focuses on the information that business email Users should know about the opentaps email processing feature, and how to use emails that contribute to the business context available on the opentaps system.

This feature is set up by the Technical System Administrator for your system, according 
to the guidance provided in Setup for opentaps email Handling.

When the special email processing is set up it will handle email like this.

1. opentaps will look-up the parties, both internal and external, associated with the email addresses in the From, To, CC, and BCC sections of the email.
2. The system then relates these addressees as Participants in a hidden "Activity" that is recorded on the system .
3. The special processing will then look for keyword strings in the subject line of the email
4. Then it associates the email with Cases and Orders Processing identified by the special keyword strings.

All Users who write your business emails need to take specific actions to ensure that the special processing works to maximum effect:

• Include all relevant email "participants" on the email address fields
• Include in the email Subject line the special keyword strings that point to Cases or Orders
• Outbound email should be copied (via BCC) to the special system "Listener" address identified by your Administrator.

Processing Inbound Email to the Users and Team Members

With this opentaps email processing set up and ready to use, opentaps Users can go to their Pending Emails Screen in CRMSFA > [My Home] and see all the business emails (coming from the Company's email server) which have been addressed or assigned to them, including those sent to your Company's standard inbound email address for Customers.

The Users can then take action on the emails, including:

• view the emails,
• respond to them,
• assign them to someone else,
• mark them as completed, or
• delete the emails.

If any of the emails on your screen are assigned to another user, those will show up on the assigned User's Pending Emails Screen also. Once an email is marked as completed, it will disappear from Pending Emails Screens and can no longer be assigned, modified, or deleted.

Email Is Associated with Business Processes

When Users do specify the keyword strings for Cases or Orders, each email will be associated with these business processes your team is working on. Users will see these emails on the summary page of any Processing Tab such as Lead, Contact, Account, Case, Activity, Opportunity, Quote, or Order to which the email is relevant.

Users must specify the keyword strings on the subject line of their emails. The special processing will then look for keyword strings in the subject line to associate the email with Cases and Orders. By default, the strings are:

 [Case: your_case_ID]
 [Order: your_order_ID]

The emails are made part of the context and history of the relevant business processes. Thus, it is well worth the effort to set up the special email handling in order that business email can appear in the activity information for relevant business transactions (Cases, Orders, Accounts, etc.) on the system.

Assignment of Email for Team Member Handling

Ownership of inbound emails is important if you want to make sure that each one is handled promptly and properly by your team members. To manage email assignment for team member handling, you can use a standard email address (that we call the "Listener") for Customer inquiries, such as customerservice@mycompany.com. Then you can use this address in the following way.

• You can have all inbound business email copied to the Listener address.
• You can have all the emails coming into that address automatically owned by one of your lead Users
• This User is responsible for prompt assignment to Team Members who provide the handling.

To implement this particular management arrangement, you can do the following:

*  Simply go to that user's profile, add the special email address to them, and add 
   the purpose "Owner of Received Emails".  This should only be assigned to one email 
   address and one User ID.
*  Then, have the Administrator set the system's email Listener on this email address, 
   as described in the section Setup for opentaps email Handling

Then, opentaps will automatically pull in all emails sent to this special email address and associate them with this user as the owner. If there are other recipients on the email, they will also see the email, but they will not be the owner. Only one user can be the "Owner of Received Emails" at any time. This initial "Owner" is the User who must then reassign the emails to the approproate Team Member for timely handling.

Archiving the Outbound Email in Business Process Context

With one simple step you can use the same facilities you configure for inbound email processing to select, associate, and archive your outbound business email. All that is required is that you copy your outbound email to the Listener email address that you have set up. You can do this in either of these two ways:

1. Blind Copy (bcc) your outbound email to the Listener address, or
2. Configure your outbound email service to copy all outbound messages to your Listener address.

Once this is done, the processing support applied to mail coming through the Listener address will be applied equally to both inbound and the copied outbound mail.

This means that your teams working on business processes will find all of the relevant outbound and inbound email associated with any particular situation (such as an Account, a Case, an Opportunity, an Order, etc.) on the system screens that the teams share. Your coordinated support work for customers, partners, vendors and other parties should be enhanced by the immediate access to this relevant context added by your emails.

Using Notification Email for the Team Members or Customers

Finally, the teamwork context of opentaps can be enhanced further by enabling notification emails to your team members whenever certain things happen, which they should be made aware of, including:

 * When people are added or removed from activities or events
 * When people are assigned to leads and accounts
 * When catalog requests have been successfully fulfilled 
 **  Optional -- When a catalog request is fulfilled an email can be sent to the 
     customer who requested it.

For set up details the Administrator should refer to Setup for opentaps email Handling