Copying all email updates to a shared mailbox

[Alan Lonie]

Hi, We are new to Hornbill Service Manager and have made great progress migrating our customers over from our legacy system. I have now encountered an issue with one customer who have been using a shared mailbox for all of their portal users. So individual logins but all sharing the same email address. They want to retain this feature so is there any way we could get all email updates sent from Hornbill to copy in a shared mailbox?  

[James Ainsworth]

Hi @Alan Lonie

Thanks for your post.

Are you using the customer's email address for logging into the portals?  If you performed an import to add your contacts it may have been set up to use their email address as their login ID.  Just for the contacts for this organisation you should be able to change to login ID for each contact to something else such as first name + last initial.  Once this is done, you should be able to give these contacts the same email address while allowing each user their own unique login. (as the Login ID and Email are held in different fields you still might be able to use the individual contact's real email address as their login ID while using the shared email address in the email field.)

There are certain features in Service Manager that provide checks on the email address such as when you are raising a new request from an email.  Despite these users having the same email address, all the users with this email address will be listed and from there you can select the contact that you wish to raise the request against.  

There might be a couple of other possible approaches that you can look at.

1.) BPM Notifications.  At any point within the life of a request you can add email notifications.  This will be to highlight important stages of the request such as the request being raised, resolved, closed, or any significant stage in your process that you define.  This however would not include all updates. In some cases this may be preferred so that the recipients are flooded with emails about every update.

2.) Portal Visibility.  It is possible to set the access to the portals so that all the users of this particular organisation can see all the other requests that have been raised.

3.) Connected Users.  On each request there is an option to add ''Connected Users''.  It would be possible to user the BPM to add all the users for this one organisation as connected users on all of their requests.  When sending an email from a request there is an option to include the Connected users.  You can also automatically send emails to the connected users from the BPM workflow.  However, if there are a large number of contacts for this one organisation, it might create some extra admin work to keep this up to date. 

Let us know if any of these look like something that would work for you and if you have any more questions about how to set this up.

Regards,

James

 

 

[Alan Lonie]

Hi James,

Thank you for your prompt response. I have just tried changing the login id as suggested and have attempted to change the email addresses of these contacts with the shared email and I get the following error. "Error - Sorry but this email IM&TInsignia@ouh.nhs.uk is already in use. This would be my preferred approach if we could get this working.

Thanks again,

Alan.

[Alan Lonie]

Hi James,

I've found a setting to disable checking for duplicate emails within Collaboration which seems to have allowed me to configure multiple users with the same email address.

Thanks,

Alan.