E-Mail

Submitted by Jerry D Reninger on Thu, 01/08/2015 - 10:14

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TechDoc Suggestions

Talked to a TechDoc customer recently that wanted to be able to trigger outbound e-mails based on a keyfield date value obselance. This would of necessity require the creation of a subsystem to create and save e-mail templates, distribution lists, and trigger parameters for a keyfield. Wondered if others would find this type of functionality helpful in the DocManager.

Comments

Joe Prevo's picture

Joe Prevo

Thu, 01/08/2015 - 12:23

We are planning to evaluate a Document Tickler feature that would allow users to be reminded of activity that needs to be performed on a document at a future date. It seems that there is a lot of overlap between that feature request and yours. We can definitely look at adding keyword value triggers as part of the feature to satisfy both requests.

After my original posting of this comment, I got to thinking about it. There is a big potential danger on this one, which is a large scale triggering event. Consider adding a keyword date trigger to happen when a project is completed. There are sometimes tens or hundreds of thousands of documents related to a single project. If someone added the "Project Complete" keyword via a Mass Modify, that could suddenly trigger all those email events to go off. We will definitely need to discuss how to handle a possible situation like that. No one wants to receive a hundred thousand emails and you probably still wouldn't want a single email listing a hundred thousand documents that were affected. A very interesting problem to say the least...

Rlayel (not verified)

Fri, 01/09/2015 - 16:33

We've not become very fluent in how the new Workflow capabilities in TD 8 will work; but in reading some of the descriptions in the documentation it seems that a workflow could be created with a keyword trigger event/date and the end result a system generated email to any predetermined user or Group.

We would be interested in a DM capability similar to what Jerry asks about; and we've been that Workflow will accommodate in its current or near future iteration.

Joey Prevo's picture

Joey Prevo

Mon, 01/12/2015 - 10:21

I assume you mean when a keyword on a document reaches a certain date/time?

Yes this ability will be available soon via workflow. Coming soon, we will be exposing nearly all of the document/generation attributes, keywords, etc. Right now we've only exposed a small set to begin with.

Once keywords are available, you'd simply want to construct a process that consists of an Intermediate Timer event, and two Service Tasks. The Intermediate timer should be set to a duration i.e. once a day, twice a day, once a week, etc. That timer would feed into a Service Task that Selects the document to check. A simple BPMN expression would then evaluate a keyword on the document, if the target date/time has been reached you continue on to the last Service Task otherwise you flow back to the timer. The last Service Task is then just setup to call the Send Email activity where you may specify whom every you wish to send the email to.

Additionally, you can use the special ${} expressions in any field of the email to include any metadata you wish to from that document. For example the title field could be:

"Important email regarding document ${document.getDocNumber()}"

At runtime, the process would resolve your expression and replace it with the document number.