Service Notifications - Email (No-Reply)

[Stephen.whittle]

As a hospital we often send planned and unplanned notifications out to staff by all user email. We are a recently merged organisation from three previous legal entity hospitals so we have a long way to go from an infrastructure perspective until we are on single platforms/services so one of the challenges we have at the moment is coordinating multi-site wide comms being sent to all users from the respective exchange environments. 

We could utilise Hornbill Emails to do this for us as all users have at the very least a basic account and would receive service notifications but we like the notices we send to be purely informational and not encourage a reply as they are sent to circa 18,000 members of staff. With this in mind is anyone already doing something similar as a no-reply function within Hornbill or can suggest a way we could do this. One limitation I have noticed is when composing an email you cannot simply send to "all basic users" so what prerequisites are there to set this up? Perhaps a group on Hornbill where we simply add all LDAP imported active users. 

Keen to get thoughts and thanks in advance for anyone that takes the time to contribute.

[James Ainsworth]

Hi Stephen, 

Thanks for your post.  I'm interested to understand if there is a particular action or place within Hornbill where you envision these emails to be sent from.  For example are you looking at emails being sent from a BPM workflow on a request that gets sent to all users?  Or are you looking to send an email manually from the Email View on Hornbill? 

A starting point might be to have a distribution list on each of the different entities' servers that Hornbill sends to.  I'm assuming that a do not reply address could be added to these distribution lists.   

 

[Stephen.whittle]

Hi James, 

Thanks for coming back so quickly. 

Yes, we do have all user distribution lists configured on the local respective exchange servers however these are dynamic distribution lists and therefore don't exist in AD and therefore are not imported with our LDAP imports. I was more thinking of a group we could create within Hornbill that all users are added to upon import which in turn leaves us with a site based group will all staff which does the same job. 

I was then planning on procuring a new mailbox to use as a do not reply service for notifications which is the starting point for manual service notifications. 

If this works and is possible I would like to develop this so we can automate some user communications based on the service availability for example, when marked as impacted email all staff that are subscribed to that service notifying them of the issue etc. 

[James Ainsworth]

Hi Stephen, 

I'm not if there is anything in place to manage sending to groups with Hornbill.  I'll feed this back to our development teams and see if there are any options that I'm overlooking. 

[Stephen.whittle]

Thanks @James Ainsworth this would also be very useful in the Email Reports functionality. At the moment you need to add recipients one by one, if somehow you could support group email that would be a move in the right direction and prevent having to create lots of distribution groups in Exchange.