Issues: New Email View in Requests

[sprasad]

My team have raised the following concerns with the New Email View, as it is causing extra work/mouse-click/scrolling.

(1)  After the email is sent (rather than displaying the email action again with an empty template, which can cause confusion and possible duplication of sending a second empty email) could we display a replacement dialog which says email sent and then you click on it to re-open the email editor to send another email, or just click on another request action icon/activity to carry on with request.

(2)  Due to the size of the email dialog now when opening to include the template, could the action bar to include time, connections, snippets etc be duplicated at the top as well as the bottom, as most users will have very substantial footers in their templates, so would be working/entering the content at the top.

(3)  As the whole email content including the template content (i.e. standard footer etc) is inserted into the timeline, this is duplicated standard content in the timeline entries. Can a configuration settings/flag be set in the template to mark where the content inserted into the timeline is stopped, so the footer information is not duplicated into every email timeline entry?

[Paul Smith]

To add to @sprasad and his concerns relating to the new change to e-mails...

We use e-mails a lot to communicate with our external customers. The e-mail templates we use all have header and footer information in line with our company logo's/information. As a result when I now look at the timeline of one of our incidents all I can see is the template header which is meaningless as far as the update is concerned so I have to expand every update. This is seen by all of the staff here as a huge step backwards as before all that was visible was the update itself.

The other bone of contention is that the support staff have to scroll down the e-mail template to the relevant section for typing the update. This makes it  much more difficult than it needs to be and if they aren't careful they can over type the template information itself.

 

[Steven Boardman]

Hi @sprasad @Paul Smith thanks for taking the time to provide your feedback, all feedback good or bad is appreciated and helps us evolve our solution.

We'll certainly take on board these comments as we review the general community response to this change.

There is always a bit of reaction when a change in behaviour is introduced but hopefully your seeing some of the benefits of presenting the HTML editor, having the ability to review / edit the content and also have access to multiple templates which were all not possible before.

In regards to the timeline comments there is an issue we are looking at where the timeline post is inserting blank lines in between some of the email template content, this is contributing to the reduced email content which is immediately visible , we are looking to address this which we hope will make this a little better.  

Steve

[HHH]

+1 for bullet number 1 in initial ticket. We have had a lot of negative feedback from analysts regarding this.

[Jeremy]

@Steven Boardman Could there be a way to restrict access to certain templates (by service or team) as we have a lot in our system that not everyone needs/wants to see, also if there was the 'old' style message box could there be a 'preview' button to be able to see the email before it's sent?

[Steven Boardman]

@Jeremy we are looking at option to limit the returned / available templates in the list.  As this progresses we'll update here.

Due to the feedback from the customer base, the next service manager update will include the following options

1. Stay using the new email preview component (Globally)

2. Revert back to the old email component i.e no preview or template selection (Globally)

3. Agent Preference - Allow each agent to decide which email option they prefer to use,  they will be able to toggle between the old and the new email components 

Steve

[Jeremy]

sounds great

[IntegraGreg]

Just to tack on another issue with this specific action:

Google Chrome (v69) - when you get a spelling error you are unable to correct it using a context menu. This works in Edge and IE11.

[Steven Boardman]

@IntegraGreg I think this behaves differently in different browsers. 

I use Chrome (v69) and the spell check and menu options are available to me - on my Mac it is CMD + Right Click, and on Windows it is CTRL + Right Click

Hope that helps

[IntegraGreg]

Hi @Steven Boardman

Thanks for this, I think before on using the previous style it was just a right-click on it's own which brought up the spellcheck. Will advise my colleagues of the change!

[lee mcdermott]

@Steven Boardman @sprasad

We have also had this raised and found people re sending the email because they are not sure the original had been sent as it auto displays the template again.

(1)  After the email is sent (rather than displaying the email action again with an empty template, which can cause confusion and possible duplication of sending a second empty email) could we display a replacement dialog which says email sent and then you click on it to re-open the email editor to send another email, or just click on another request action icon/activity to carry on with request.

 

Steve does any of the below address this? One question was can the system default back to the update tab(view) rather than stay on the email tab?

Due to the feedback from the customer base, the next service manager update will include the following options

1. Stay using the new email preview component (Globally)

2. Revert back to the old email component i.e no preview or template selection (Globally)

3. Agent Preference - Allow each agent to decide which email option they prefer to use,  they will be able to toggle between the old and the new email components 

 

thanks

 

lee

[lee mcdermott]

@Steven Boardman

 

just seen that update is actually available now. I have applied it and that is much better thanks.

 

lee

[Logan Graham]

Hi @Steven Boardman Thought I'd tag into this as well, I have changed the new settings to give my analysts the option to have the template on or off but I am wanting to know if there is a way to globally set it to off and then give the option to turn it on for the analyst, I am still finding that the analysts are having to go into each job and turn it off and I have also found that Caching in Chrome seems to be a factor(Not really your guys issue just thought Id mention it). It seems to be set to default to keep the template showing can we have the option change this to be the other way round? 

Thanks,

Logan G

[Steven Boardman]

Hi @Logan Graham thanks for the message. 

This is on by default in the analyst choice setting so this maintained existing behaviour, but if the analysts turn this off, it does persist - so once turned off it will persist when the analysts is viewing all requests, i appreciate what you are saying about the caching, if users clear their browser cache it will then persist to their preference.

I will ask the question about an additional option to default to off when in analyst choice, but for now clearing the browser cache should resolve the persistence issue for users. 

Steve

[Paul Smith]

Hi @Steven Boardman

The biggest issue for us with the changes to the e-mail was that the timeline update on the request was full of template and you had to expand to actually read the update itself. The above amendments you have made have not resolved this even when I have changed the settings to:

2. Revert back to the old email component i.e no preview or template selection (Globally)

Before you made the changes the old email component resulted in only the update that was keyed showing in the timeline. Have I missed a setting because that is exactly what we want again ?

Our ideal scenario is to give the individual user the option to decide if they use new Preview option or the old e-mail component but either way the timeline only shows the update itself not the full template ( if we want to see the full e-mail we'd use the View E-mail option available ). This cuts down on the noise in the timeline and encourages collaboration.

I welcome your feedback

Thanks

Paul    

 

 

[J_Tamburrini]

Good Morning guys,

 

we have updated and its great to get both functions. However those wanting to use the email function the old way get the following error:

 

Any ideas where id find the {{message}} variable ? i don't want it to affect eh other message template we have as that's working fine ( expect the for spell checker)

 

 

JT

[Steven Boardman]

Hi @J_Tamburrini

This should be covered here on the wiki: https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/Email_Action_Item

Basically you need to add the {{message}} variable back into the requestmessage email template

* For those using the new email editor, this variable will be automatically stripped and they can manually add their content to the email preview before sending

* Foe those working with the old approach, they will have any text entered into the email action item box, passed into the email template via the {{message}} variable, so this needs adding back into the requestmessage email template in the admin console

This will then cater for both use cases.

Hope that helps

Steve

[Jeremy]

@Steven Boardman when you turn the setting (app.email.request.operation.composerType) to 'analyst setting' is the default to use the message box or the template chooser?

[Steven Boardman]

@Jeremy it was default to template chooser as this is the current behaviour - if a user changes this to message box it will persist on their choice moving forward.

[sprasad]

Hi @Steven Boardman
Many thanks for the changes made recently, which has been helpful.

An issue that remains is the formatting of non-standard characters which makes reading back the contents of an email via the timeline quite painful. 
In our example case, we had used the below text on the Email.

<common:Reference> as well as 
 "Site &amp;

When this was inserted into the timeline, the view shows as follows:-
&lt;common:Reference&gt;
"Site &amp;amp;

I will be grateful for your feedback.