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Send mail to users in grouptask

JeremyH

Do any of the iwov provided mail scripts send mail to all users in a group task?

The modifications to the scripts have been fairly straitforward for users (though a little more tricky for groups.) Is this in any version (or will it be in any version) of the scripts?

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nipper

Don't think that is available, but you can set up an email alias & email to TS_REVEIWERS@myco.com

HTH

Andy

Bill Klish

I don't think it is currently or will be in the future. What you could do is iteratively pull each of your users from the group task using the workflow APIs and use the scripts you have already customized to process each user individually.

JeremyH

I just discovered that it is actually implemented now -
in the solutions_email script.

Now, I just have to get it to send out the mails...

Migrateduser

No, the iw_solutions_email.ipl script does not send mail to all of the members of a group. But it can send email to a group.

For example, if you have a grouptask that is sharedby the group "sales", then it will try to send email to the "sales" address (either getting the address from the solutions/email_map.cfg or adding your domain -- sales@mydomain.com). It assumes that you have a mailing list for any groups to which you try to send mail.

Brinko Kobrin
Interwoven Staff Engineer

Migrateduser

Sure would be nice if the iw_solutions_email script was smart enough to send email to the whole group. Doesn't seem like that would be too much to ask. It also would be nice if the script could take additional recipients as input parameters so that people other than the owner of the next task could receive notifications when desired. While the solutions email is the best option of all the supplied email options, it is not very robust.

Dave Smith
Sr. Software Engineer
Nike, Inc.
(503) 671-4238
DavidH.Smith@nike.com

Luckily, in our case we currently have a group of individual users assigned to a group task (instead of a Unix group.) In this scenario, the solution script does just what we want it to do.

Migrateduser

The iw_solutions_email.ipl can be used to send mail to other people either instead of or in addition to the owner of the next task. See the manual for an explanation of how this script works.

There are two reasons that the OOTB email templates do not expand groups into sets of individual users. Firstly, this often generally ugly and inefficient as the number of users within a group can be quite large. In fact, some mail relays will choke when the number of addresses is too large. Secondly, we have not found a reliable, platform-independent way to do this mapping.

If you so desire, you can create a modified header template that does a group-to-user expansion for your site.

Brinko Kobrin
Interwoven Staff Engineer

Migrateduser

The problem with the way the script works now when you add additional recipients is that the additional recipients get the exact same message that the owner of the next task gets. I don't want the 3 people receiving the email as a courtesy to read that they have a task waiting for them in TeamSite. I want the message to say something else. So if I want other people to get an email but not the same email that the next task owner sees, I have to use a wrapper around this script, which is what I do today. I'm just saying that the tools you provide to help us should be more robust. I think more thought could have gone into the tenplate based email script and I'm disappointed that it hasn't changed in any release since it was first released. So much is done to add more to the Interwoven suite of products, but so little is done to make what we already have better.

As far as mapping groups to users, how hard is it on Solaris to parse the group name from the task, get the members of that group and then use email_map.cfg to determine the list of email addresses to send the email to? Am I missing something?

I know that I can do just about anything if I so desire. But I'd rather not have to - I have plenty of other things to do. Things like this should be built into the product - after all a grouptask is nothing new - it's been around as long as workflow. If you're going to provide an email utility that sends emails out to task owners, then it should have included the complication for grouptasks. To tell us to just do it ourselves is a bit of a cop out.

Dave Smith
Sr. Software Engineer
Nike, Inc.
(503) 671-4238
DavidH.Smith@nike.com

Adam Stoller

Smitty - with regard to mapping groups to individual uisers - consider a rather varied set of environmens:

Solaris with native OS group management
Solaris with NIS or YP group management
Solaris with LDAP group management
AIX with ...
Windows 2000 with native OS group management
Windows 2000 with ActiveDirectory
Windows 2000 with ActiveDirectory with nested groups
...

There are a fair amount of variables - and then - once you've managed to do some transitive closure on expanding the list of groups into a list of individuals, you have to turn those entries into email addresses - do you use the email_map.cfg, do you use LDAP or ActiveDirectory, do you just wing it and slap @$maildomain onto them, etc.

Is it possible - probably. Is it likely to have a lot of time spent developing it and then supporting it from Interwoven - less likely.

I believe DevNet will soon be offering the ability for contributions from members - if so, perhaps someone will spend some time writing routines for one or more of the above variations and post it for others to use and/or build on.

As for sending different email to different recipients - that seems particularly customized to me - and thus I'd assume that you run two instances of the script to send the email - though I guess I can see how you'd like to do a content-reuse / templating kind of thing where you generate multiple email messages with slightly different content and destined for slightly different audiences (though I'm still not sure how you'd program in that part of the logic).

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com