So I am finally coming to the end of a piece of work I am doing for one of our contracts and there was a genuine need to mandate a phrase at the beginning of every email from the Service Desk and also include the signature block of the user sending the email. Whilst the solution to doing this wasn’t exactly rocket-science, I thought it might save one of you guys the trouble if I posted my solution:
Mandated Subject Line:
So the first challenge was to mandate a phrase in the subject line. So by way of an example, let’s say that you wanted to make sure that the subject of every email sent by any staff member, started with “Service Desk Notification:” What I did was to create a simple client-side business rule (CSBR).
Conditions
| On Data Change – <Any Field> | |||
| Expression 1 | Comparison Operator | Expression 2 | Logical Operator |
|---|---|---|---|
| {SUBSTR,1,26,{TR,Subject} SS} | NotEqual | Service Desk Notification: | None |
Actions
| Method | Module | Form |
|---|---|---|
| Populate Current Form | Email Conversation | Email Conversation |
| Field Name | Value |
|---|---|
| Subject | Service Desk Notification: {TR,Subject} |
So basically, when ever a field is changed on the form (handles when a user doesn’t bother entering a subject), the rule checks to see if the first 26 characters of the new subject is “Service Desk Notification:”. If it is not then the rule appends the new subject to the words, “Service Desk Notification:”
Signature Blocks:
The second challenge was to automatically insert the signature block of the user sending the email using a standard IS Service signature block. The solution to this was a lot easier than I had imagined. I created another CSBR:
Conditions
| On Save | |||
| Expression 1 | Comparison Operator | Expression 2 | Logical Operator |
|---|---|---|---|
Actions
| Method | Module | Form |
|---|---|---|
| Populate Current Form | Email Conversation | Email Conversation |
| Field Name | Value |
|---|---|
| Body | {TR,Body}
Regards, {DB,Support Staff,Full Name,”Login ID” = ‘{MAGICUSER}’ DB} You can track the progress of any of your tickets by visiting our Self-Service portal (http://servicedesk) and clicking on the link to My Tickets. |
On save, the rule essentially goes and gets all the details from the Support Staff table for the user sending the email ({MAGICUSER}) and creates and appends the signature block.
And that was it.
JOATIT 
I have a question not directly related to this, but close.
Is there a way that when a client responds back to a email conversation, it caputures there name and email address? The reason I ask is sometimes I send an email to more than 1 person using email conversation, however if they all reply to the email, I can’t tell which reply goes with which person? I was wondering if there is somehow I can leverage this “Signature” block to capture the information from the client responding back to email conversation.
When I get to the Assignment Tab for teh CSBR for the Mandated Subject lin, I have 4 Options:
Email Conversation
Collaboration Message Reply
DPC_Email Converstaion
[CSE] Collaboration Message Reply.
Do I need to assign to all of them?
Hi Dustin,
Thanks for the comments – as you know they are always welcome. Re your first comment I’m not sure but I’ll have a think and post back something … Re your second comment, you only need to assign the CSBR to the form that your users are using when they click Email Conversation. Judging by the list I would suggest that that is likely to be DPC_Email Conversation.
Hope this helps.
Regards,
Alan
Hi Dustin,
Thinking about your first comment. I think that an email conversation record is created both on inbound and outbound emails and hence you could write a Server Side business rule that on creation of Email Conversation with {TR,AddrTo} = YourServiceDeskEmailAddress (i.e. you only want this rule to fire on inbound emails), update THAT email conversation setting the body equal to {TR,Body} From: {TR,AddrFrom} {TR,Display Name}. I haven’t tried it but I think it should work.
Regards,
Alan