Introduction to Sending Activities by Email

The Mail Channel allows Human Activities like Approval and Checklist to be sent by email to the intended recipient(s) who can perform the necessary action from the Inbox of email clients like Microsoft Office Outlook. The Human Activities have to be configured to enable this functionality. The topics in this section describe the steps required to make these configurations.

Configuring the Activities

In the Activity Properties section of the Process Designer, click on the Configuration node to expand it. This node has the Delivery Channels property, which you can use to set the medium through which the activity will be delivered to the recipient(s). You can select "MailWorkList" or "WebWorkList" or both from the pop up window for this property.

• If MailWorkList is selected the Activity is sent only to the recipient's email Inbox. In this case, the actor can view the work item and respond as required without leaving their email Inbox.

• If WebWorkList is selected the Activity is sent only to the recipient's Work items list Inbox. This means that the actor will have to open the Work Item List to view the activity and respond.

• If both channels are selected the activity will be sent to the Work items list as well as by email. In this case, the actor can respond to the work item email delivered to the email Inbox. They will also be able to view and respond to work items from the Work items list.

  Note: For Email and Human Activities, the Subject field should use only the following special characters: ~!@#$%^*()_+|}{:?`-=][\;,./
  Other special characters may be encoded.

Action Response from Email clients

There are three methods in which the actors can respond to the work item assigned to them through the email channel:

1. Offline

2. Online

3. Microsoft Office Outlook

These methods are described below.

Offline: This method is useful when users are not directly connected to the Internet. For example, when you are using a laptop computer. In this method, actors can type in their comments and their choice of response within the square brackets provided against the respective field. For instance, if an Approval activity is received in the email, and you have chosen to approve, then you can reply to the email with your response. In your reply you can type your comments against the Comments field and "Approve" against the Action field. The response will be sent when the email client next sends out the emails.

Online: This method can be used when users are connected to the Internet. In the body of the email there is an online section, where users can type in their comment and specify their response using the controls provided. For example, there will be two buttons - Approve and Reject - in the Approval Activity email. You can click on the preferred button. In the case of Checklist emails, after specifying the values, you can click on the Submit button that is available to submit your response. In both cases the response will be sent immediately.

Microsoft Office Outlook: This method is exclusively for users having Microsoft Office Outlook as their email client. In this method you can right click on the work item email in the Inbox and select the appropriate response from the context menu. For example, if it is an Approval activity then the context menu will show two options - Approve and Reject - from which the user can select one. This feature can be enabled in Microsoft Office Outlook by installing a utility that is provided along with AVEVA Work Tasks.