New in Rulemanager: Support for Multiple email addresses for a contact or employee
Earlier this summer I blogged some thoughts around multiple email addresses for a contact or employee.
I wanted to throw out a little update about how we’re addressing this. We’re addressing this in two ways – via Rulemanager, and via DovetailAgent.
I’ll cover the DovetailAgent changes in a future post.
Rulemanager
We’ve modified Dovetail Rulemanager so that it supports multiple email addresses in a single email field. This could be on the employee or on the contact’s email field. The email addresses can be separated by a comma, semicolon, or a space.
Lets see it in action
I’ve created a new employee with the ever-so-descriptive name of “Multiple Emails”
This employee has two SMTP addresses in the one email address field:
If I have a business rule that notifies this employee, I can see that the notification gets sent to both email addresses:
Sweet!
What if one of the email addresses is invalid?
For example, I added “bad” to the email address as another entry, so that it is: gsherman@hotmail.com;bad,gsherman@gmail.com
Looking at the log file, I can see the warning that one of the entries is invalid:
2011-10-04 15:01:24,305 [Consumer5] WARN FChoice.RuleManager.EmailAddressParseService – Employee: multiple has an invalid email address "bad". Entire email address field: gsherman@hotmail.com;bad,gsherman@gmail.com
And that the email gets sent to the two good email addresses:
2011-10-04 15:01:24,372 [Consumer5] DEBUG FChoice.RuleManager.EmailService – Sending Email to recipients:
From: support@localhost.com
TO: "Annie Agent" <annie@localhost.com>, "Multiple Emails" <gsherman@hotmail.com>, "Multiple Emails" <gsherman@gmail.com>
CC:
Subject: Case 444 Dispatched
I gotta get me some of that Rulemanager hotness
Customers with an open support contract for Rulemanager can download the latest version from the My Products page on the Dovetail SelfService site.
Need Dovetail Rulemanager? Contact our sales team, and mention coupon code GARY.BLOG.2011 for a special discount. My gift to you.
Comments
Honestly, I’m not a big fan of having multiple email addresses in a single email field. If you need a distribution list, then create a distribution list on your email server.
But, I do understand that the days of a person having only one email address are long gone. And there’s some desire to be feature compatible with Clarify Rulemanager.
And current shipping versions of DovetailAgent and Clarify Classic Client do not support the e_addr functionality.
So it’s the reality of where things are, and customers have work to get done – and we’re here to help.
Hope you find this new functionality useful.
Rock on.
