This is just a little thing that IMO puts a polish on a program for the through and through. Here's the scenario: We opted to use SMTP notifications instead of forcing/convincing users to have yet another app to go look for communications (existing Outlook or the PDM messaging interface.) That's been well enough. Now that we have three to five hundred files released per week there are a lot of review and released notification emails being sent out by the PDM server. Sometimes there's some conversation about that and the users tend to forward the notification email, which is nice as it has the handy links in it. Problem is there are a dozen of active and concurrent email threads with identical subject/conversation so when grouping by conversation in Outlook or using the "find all emails in this conversation" functionality in Outlook users get a useless result set with ALL the emails.
IMO, a polished, well-planned solution would be to have the subject name include something unique about that transition, maybe the transition name and the first file name or something. That would keep forwarded email conversations isolated and relevant. Just a thought and wondering if anyone else has found solution to this.
AlexB wrote: ↑Thu May 12, 2022 2:57 pm
That would be nice. I haven't found a way to do that other than the API possibly. That's a complex solution to a simple issue though...
Edit: Looks like IEdmUser5.SendMsg does the trick but I can't think of a way to simply implement that...
Right, trying to send an email isn't that hard, but I don't think I'd send it through the PDM notification system anyway. My other request would be to just use the users' email so that replies would be simpler and much more importantly the user would have a history of the notification emails that have been send by them.
You can use system variables when defining transition actions. For example, you can include the file name (%filename% variable) in the subject line of an e-mail action.
Maybe that could be the initial notification, then when there's a delay in state notification, you use the regular Notification option? That would presume that the same user/group would need to get the initial notification every time as it wouldn't be something that could be selected dynamically when transitioned, so it might not work.
Maybe that could be the initial notification, then when there's a delay in state notification, you use the regular Notification option? That would presume that the same user/group would need to get the initial notification every time as it wouldn't be something that could be selected dynamically when transitioned, so it might not work.
You might be onto something. The description field in the action seems to be used as the subject line. I didn't know that until your post prompted me to test it.
We ended up using the API to do this, mostly for our ECO system in PDM. This was so we could put any variable in the subject and message body. Also so we could send to to users whose name is in some of the variables (Approvers), before they added that option a few version back.
AlexB wrote: ↑Fri May 13, 2022 8:18 am
You might be onto something. The description field in the action seems to be used as the subject line. I didn't know that until your post prompted me to test it.
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I'm missing how to dynamically select who to send the email to. I don't see how the user doing the "To Review" transition can tell PDM who the reviewer is other than finding them in the list of dynamically selected notification recipients.
I believe it would have to be stored as a file variable before the transition happens if you want it to be dynamic. It's clunky and I haven't found a great way to send notifications either for my items. Seems like notifications were sort of an afterthought that just never got implemented like they should.
bnemec wrote: ↑Fri May 13, 2022 11:15 am
I'm missing how to dynamically select who to send the email to. I don't see how the user doing the "To Review" transition can tell PDM who the reviewer is other than finding them in the list of dynamically selected notification recipients.
I don't know that it can be selected dynamically. I suspect that it would be tricky or not possible...I understand that sometimes the same workflow could be used by multiple groups, but the reviews would remain internal to that group, so a blanket notification to everyone wouldn't be helpful but I suspect that's how this feature would operate (predefined recipients for the notification). Sorry if that's not helpful, I didn't want to make assumptions either way regarding how your notifications were being handled.
bnemec wrote: ↑Fri May 13, 2022 11:15 am
I'm missing how to dynamically select who to send the email to. I don't see how the user doing the "To Review" transition can tell PDM who the reviewer is other than finding them in the list of dynamically selected notification recipients.
bnemec, Just curious what you ended up doing about this, if anything ?
MartyB wrote: ↑Thu Aug 04, 2022 2:15 pm
bnemec, Just curious what you ended up doing about this, if anything ?
I've added it to my PDM Pro TTL, does that count as "doing something"?
I have not. I'm not PDM Admin any longer, thankfully, and there are other items on the work list. As Jason mentioned the best way to go about it would be API/addin. I had to review the thread to remember the main point and it was to get the part number(s) in the email subject so the email threads would be unique in Outlook. I looked into API options and if we were to go that route we would avoid the PDM notification, instead we would open a new email in Outlook with custom message, subject and recipient based on user's "review buddy". This would allow us to see the sent emails as PDM notifications disappear once sent which is a separate topic that could be solved at the same time. But it's not low hanging fruit and there's still other tasks that are higher priority for the PDM Admin.
