Method Community

I've gotten to the point in my customization where I am working on emails. The templates are great for standard emails, but often times our salespeople like to modify a templated email to put a personal message to a customer.

What I would like to happen when I click the "Send email" button on my screen is for the actual email contents to pop up for review and possible editing before it is actually sent. Quickbooks, when set up with Outlook, will open an Outlook email window with the template entered and the relevant attachment added. This has its own (stupid) limitations, since QB will only attach a single document, and the emails has to be in plain text format, so no company logo, etc. 

So what are my options for previewing/editing an email before it is sent? I'm guessing Method doesn't have its own browser based email editing screen. Could I use Method (or its API) to actually cause an Outlook mail window to open up, like in Quickbooks? Or do you maybe work with Gmail or some other mail service? Have any other users done something similar to this?

As a separate question, is there a way to change the filenames of reports that will be attached? The filenames are something like "PurchaseOrder_123397882_847359247.PDF", and it would be nice to change the filename to include the RefNumber, or the date, or whatever, rather than internal ID numbers.

By the way, I can imagine a setup for "custom" emails where I add a text field that a salesperson can write a personal message into, then use a merge field to stick that at the end of a email template. But before I resort to that, I'd like to know if I have the option for more precise control and editing of the email itself.

smohyee - try this out on our standard screens.

1. Activities >>> New Activity
2. Select a contact  with a valid email
3. Scroll down and check the option 'Send an Email?'
4. Select an existing email template

now…

Notice that the email body pre-fills. Try change the contents of the email body by adding your own additional text. This way you are using a standard template and still allows your users to makes changes on the fly. It works because the send email action is referencing the editor for the email body.

Exactly what I was looking for... now to figure out how to get this email editing tab into my Invoice/PO/SO screens. I'll start messing around with it and see what I can do.

Come to think of it, I guess it may make sense to copy the info from my invoice over to the activity screen, and make sure every email that is sent out is a new activity, so Method can keep better track of emails. Activities/Cases are untouched territory for me, time to go educate myself. 

Bump to address the last question in my OP: 

Can the filenames of reports that are attached to emails be modified? 

smohyee - I don't believe this is possible right now.

Method_Valbon, is this option possible at this time?  Also, how do you attach a document to an email template?

Hi AJ,

It is possible to include an attachment in the email. Take a look at the Send Email action and you will notice the option for ‘Attachment Location’. If you use this with the Generate a Report action to silently run generate the report (un-checking the option to show it in a new window) this can be used in the Send Email action for attachment location. These steps are easy for Method Reports.

If you are trying to attach a file that is stored within the Method Documents area, follow the steps below.

1. Added a Retrieve Value From table action

   Table: DocumentLibrary
    From Field: Document

2. Placed this action just ahead of the send email action
3. Modified the send email to include this attachment via the action result name