The Case - Email Gateway

Introduction

The email gateway allows your users to not do anything special within the Tiny ERP client. They can create, assign or update cases by simply sending or receiving mails with their usual mail client (outlook, thunderbird, evolution, ...).

The following schema represent the gateway action:

To better undertand the email gateway, lets imagine the following situation:

Example of usage:

A customer send an email to support@mycompany.com
The case is automatically created in Tiny ERP and some rules applies:
- It's a gold partner, set priority of the case to high
- The case is automatically open and assigned to a user
- Tiny ERP automatically thanks the customer for his message
- As the user is new in the company, the chief is added to watchers (CC)
The user receive the email with the right priority and case number
If he forgot to reply within 48 hours, he gets a reminder by Tiny ERP
The user reply to the customer by email
Then Tiny ERP automatically updates the case:
- The history is filled with the question and the answer,
- The case evolved to the pending state because we are waiting a response
- the response is automatically sent to all watchers
If the customer replies, the case is reopened otherwise the state is closed after a few days.

And all these steps are made automatically by the mail wateway without using the Tiny ERP Client. So, this implied no effort from the user or the partner.

And, as everything is recorded in Tiny ERP, the user can go in the interface to perform powerfull actions:

If he has to go into hollidays, he reassign the unclosed cases,
He can get the complete history of the case or the partner,
He can automatically create a proposal based on a support request,
He can search for existing case with the same trouble,
He can track the history of actions for this partner, eso.

And the manager get all statistics he needs to improve their support process:

Average time between the creation of the case and his closing,
Number of cases closed by month per user and per section,
Analyse trends with case categories, eso.

Sending Commands to Tiny ERP by email

You can also send commands to Tiny ERP by email about a defined case. Only the user responsible of the case can do this.

To do this, write your commands in the first lines of the message. Your commands must be on the form:

 Set-[ACTION] : [VALUE]

Where action define what you plan to modify and value the new value. Allowed actions and value are:

State : pending, close, cancel or open
Priority : 1-5 (1 = Highest, 5 = Lowest)
User: login or name of a Tiny ERP user which will be the new responsible of this case
Cost: the planned costs of this case
Revenue: the planned revenue of this case
Probability : the probability of succeed of this case (0-1)
Partner: the email of the new responsible on the partner side

For example, if you reply to the following message, you will set Emmanuel (ede) as the new responsible and set the case as Pending because you are waiting for the confirmation of the partner.

 Set-User: ede
 Set-State : pending

 Hello Emmanuel,
 Here is a case you should take into account.
 Fabien

Automatic States

When a partner send an email about a case, this case is automatically set to:

draft if it is a new case
open if it is not in draft state, (either if it was closed or pending)

When the user replies to the partner, the case is set to close. (unless specified with Set-State: pending).

To be sure Tiny ERP will detect the associated case to a mail, do not remove the ID wich is between brackets in the subject. This ID is automatically added by the mail gate when forwarding customers emails.

Example for a support section

The following picture is an example of a support section using this system. In addition to the normal interactions by email, the user can go to the Tiny ERP interface and process a series of actions at any level:

Prioritize the case,
Reassign to another user,
Escalate or forward to another section,
Statistics analysis,
Send reminders,
Assign watchers,
Create or redesign rules,
Get the list of open cases, ...

If a Tiny ERP user send a mail to a partner, the state is set as close or pending, depending on your configuration. You can also create a rule to change this.

Fault Tolerant

The eMAil gateway is fault tolerant for different reasons

If he can not reach the Tiny ERP server or if the connection crash, he will forward all emails to a default email address provided with the -d argument.
When you reply to an email (either from the partner or the user), the mail gateway has put a Reply-To header with 2 emails: the final recipient and the support email address. So that there is always one mail that is directly sent to the recipient. If the mail client does not support the 'Reply-To' feature, the gateway detects that the recipient did not received a copy and send a copy to him.

Installation

To benefit from the gateway usage, you have to install it. There is different methods available, depending on your mail server. We will describe here a generic and simple method using the fetchmail program.

First you have to create an email address (POP3 or IMAP) for each section you plan to interface. Let's say you created the address 'support@mycompany.com' with the following details:

POP Server: pop.mycompany.com
Login: support
Password: mypass

Then you have to choose a Tiny ERP user that will be used by the gateway to access the Tiny ERP server. Let's say you will use this one:

User ID: 3
Password: admin

To get the ID of the user, open his form using the menu: Administration > Users > Users. Then note this Id written at the bottom of the screen.

Finally, you need a case section that is created in Tiny ERP using this menu: CRM & SRM > Definitions > Cases > Sections. Use the ID (better) of the case or his code. Let's say we will define the section with the code 'SSUP'.

After that, you must install fetchmail on the same machine of the Tiny ERP server. You wan download this program through this website: http://fetchmail.berlios.de/ Then write a file named fetchmailrc that contains the following rules:

 # fetchmailrc

 poll pop.mycompany.com proto pop3:
 username support password mypass mda "/path/to/terpmg/tinyerp-mailgate.py -u3 -padmin -ssupport -esupport@mycompany.com"

And run fetchmail:

 fetchmail -f fetchmailrc

When trying to run fetchmail for the first time, add -v to get all logging messages.

Each time you run fetchmail, it will download requests, dispatch them and update the case in Tiny ERP. You can run fetchmail in background so that it check mails every 5 minutes using the -d 300 attribute. If you do not like the 5 minute delay, consider integrating the tinyerp-mailgate program directly with your mail server.

If you want to receive requests by email, do not forget to create a rule that assign incoming messages to a given user and verify that this user as an email address in Tiny ERP (through the address field).

You must also ensure that a mail server able to send emails is configured in your server.