Incoming emails can now change the Workflow Step and Status of items!
This long-awaited Feature has now become a reality within OnTime v8.1! You can now configure OnTime to automatically change the Workflow Step or the Status of an item when a new email arrives for that item. Here's an FAQ that will tell you how to get this great new feature configured.
I. Setting up your POP3 mail account to use the new feature
First, go to "Tools>Manage>Email Accounts". Select an email account and click the Edit Account toolbar button. On the Edit Account window, notice the new Customer Emails tab:
There are 3 things you can configure OnTime to do when a new email arrives:
- Do nothing - This is the default setting, OnTime will behave as it has in previous versions and do nothing.
- Change the item's Status - Enable this option and then select a Status type to configure OnTime to change the Status. Keep in mind that Tasks do not use the built-in Status field within OnTime, so this option will only be used for Defects, Features or Incidents.
- Change the item's Workflow Step - Enable this option to configure OnTime to dynamically change the workflow step based on the current workflow step of the item.This third option requires you to make a few other changes, as described below.
II. Using the "Change the item's Workflow Step" option Because you may have many different Workflows throughout OnTime, you'll need to separately configure each workflow step in order to tell OnTime which workflow step to move an item into if a new email arrives. First, click the Manage Workflow link on the Edit Account window, or go to 'Defects(or Features, Tasks, Incidents)>Manage Workflow'. Then select one of your workflow steps, edit it, and under the Other Settings tab you'll see a new option:
You can see from the above example that I've configured OnTime to move an item from the 'Closed' workflow step to the 'In Progress' step if a new email arrives for one of my items.
If you don't want a new email to change the workflow step, you can select the same workflow step as the one you're editing. For example, if an item is already in the 'New Incident' workflow step when a new
email arrives for that item, I might want to leave the item in the 'New Incident'
step. In that case I could simply make sure that when I edit the New Incident workflow step this option has no other step selected:
Thank you,
Tom Harder
Axosoft Support
support@axosoft.com1.800.653.0024 option 3--'Fear the Bug' Podcast--