Shared Email Manager

for Sugar by Eontek - v1.0

Installation

Shared Email Manager needs to be installed like any other module, using Module Loader in the Admin section. Quick repair and rebuild is performed within the installation process, so you don’t have to do it manually. The first thing you need to do before using the module is entering a license key (the key you got along with purchased installable package). Please go back to the admin page after installation, and under ‘Shared Email Manager Configuration’ section (on the bottom of the page) you’ll find ‘License Validation’ link. Clicking the link will lead you to the section where you need to enter the license key, and hit ‘Validate’.

If you receive any message other than ‘Success!’ after validating entered key, please contact us.

After validation you need to add the users you want to enable the module to on the Licensed Users list. Those users can now start using the Shared Emails Manager module!

Configuring a Mailbox

Now when the module is active, you need to refresh the page so ‘Shared Emails Manager’ link can show up the main menu. Click on the ‘Create’ button in the list view in order to create your first mailbox (we’ll refer Shared Emails Manager record as ‘mailbox’ from now on). Please note that the ‘Name’ field will be used to identify the mailbox, and other users will be able to use that same mailbox (so you can call it ‘marketing@example.com’ or just ‘Marketing’). The next step is to relate an existing Inbound Email account from sugar. You can do this by setting the ‘Inbound Email Name’ field. If you don’t have any inbound emails created, please look at ‘Creating Inbound Email’ section down below.

Please note that relating the mailbox with Inbound Email from sugar will be pulling the emails from that email account into the mailbox. All existing emails (the ones that were received in the Inbound Email prior to module installation) will be visible in the mailbox.

It is important to point out the difference between inbound and outbound email accounts. We can say that a mailbox (shared email manager) is equivalent of inbound email. Let’s say your company has a support email account where customers can send their issues and problems to (support@yourcompany.com). If you want to set up a shared email manager for this email account, you would need to create an inbound email record within SugarCRM, and relate it to shared email manager record. You would also need to relate the users responsible for support to the shared email manager (mailbox). Every member of support team will now have access to the same mailbox. If user wants to respond to an email, he needs to do so from outbound email account. Please note that this account can be the same as the inbound email account, but usually that’s not the case. Company may have a transactional and marketing email solution implemented, which can be used as outbound email account. Number of outbound emails can be set for one inbound email account.

Before you can use the mailbox and look through the emails, there are a couple of things that need to be configured (please see the image below):

1. You must relate the users that will be using this mailbox. That can be done in the Users subpanel. By doing this, you will enable access to this mailbox only to those users. Nobody else will be able to see this mailbox.

2. You must configure one or more Outbound Emails. They are used for sending the emails from SugarCRM. You can do so by clicking on the ‘Configure Outbound Email’ button which is a subitem on the dropdown next to the ‘Mailbox’ button. You can find an in-depth explanation on how to set up everything in the section ‘Configuring Outbound Email’.

3. Dropdown next to the ‘Mailbox’ button also contains ‘Configure Mailbox’ button. This option enables you to set up the stages, or processes that emails can be in. You can find more on this topic in the ‘Configure Mailbox’ section.

Creating an Inbound Email

Inbound Email can be created from the Sugar Administration page by clicking on ‘Inbound Email’ link. Once clicked Inbound Email List View will be opened.

From Navigation bar expand Inbound Email menu and select "New Group Mail Account" option. This will open Inbound Email Create view allowing you to create your new shared mailbox (this step can be skipped if you already have mailbox set).

Populate Inbound Email parameters and then click on ‘Test Settings’ button in order to verify settings. If you get success message, save the record. If not, please contact your technical support asking to provide you with the correct parameters for setting up the mail account.

Creating an Outbound Email

As it was already mentioned, you can create an OE by clicking on the ‘Configure Outbound Email’ button which is a subitem on the dropdown next to the ‘Mailbox’ button (which is located in the upper right corner of the screen on the Shared Email Manager detail view).

Said button will pull down a drawer, and you’ll be presented with 2 buttons: ‘Relate existing outbound email’ and ‘Create new outbound email’. The first one lets you to relate an existing OE to the mailbox. What this means is that you can set one Outbound Email for multiple mailboxes. This item will be explained in more detail in the following text (please see ‘Editing an Outbound Email’ section). We’ll focus on creating a new OE for now.

Please take a look at the image below.

Here are the fields that need to be set:

• Choose your Email provider: this is where you can choose from some of the most popular email providers. Selecting any of those will pre-populate some of the data (such as SMPT server and port). If your provider is not among the listed ones, select ‘Other’. Please contact your technical support or email provider to get the information needed for setting up the outbound email configuration. If you never used that email account for sending the emails from the third party apps, chances are that you’ll need to enable that in the email account configuration page.

• Name: this field’s value will not be used anywhere in the email. It will be used in the dropdown when selecting existing OEs that can be related to the mailbox.

• ‘From Name’: this field’s value will be set on the email. Email recipient will see this value as email sender. Majority of email providers allow setting the from field.

• ‘From Address’: this field’s value will also be set on the email. Recipient will see this value as the email address the email was sent from. Please note that not all email service provider will allow changing this value on the email. In other words, this setting will be ignored by certain email providers, and the actual email address will be visible when email comes to its destination. If your email provider is Google, for instance, chances are you will not be able to utilise this field. Sendgrid, on the other hand, will display this field’s value as email sender.

• ‘SMPT Server’, ‘SMPT Port’, ‘Use SMTP Authentication?’ and ‘Enable SMTP over SSL or TLS?’ is the information that you’ll need to get from your technical support or email service provider.

• Last two things that need to be configured are username and password of the email account.

After entering all the data, please go ahead and hit ‘Send Test Email’ button (input field for entering an email address will be displayed after click on said button, along with ‘Send Email’ and ‘Cancel’ buttons). Hitting ‘Send Email’ will send an email using the entered data to the specified address. Please make sure this test email reached set destination. That would mean that configuration is entered properly and that you can click on ‘Done’ button. Your OE configuration will be saved by doing so.

Editing an Outbound Email

If any of OE configuration details gets changed (username or password), or if you want to change ‘From’ name or address, you can do so by clicking on ‘Configure Outbound Email’ located under ‘Mailbox’ drop-down on the mailbox detail view. You’ll see the list of outbound email accounts related to the mailbox. You can then edit, unlink or completely delete any of the OE records. Please note that un-relating (broken chain icon next to the OE name) will just un-relate the OE from mailbox, but that OE will stay active on other mailboxes it’s related to. If you delete an OE (trash can icon), you’ll be removing the account completely, and that OE will not be visible on other mailboxes it was related to.

Clicking on ‘Relate existing outbound email’ button that you can find on the same view will display a list of existing Outbound Email configurations which you can relate to your mailbox and thus make them appear in ‘From’ field when email is being replied to. More on composing and email can be found in the following text.

Configure Mailbox

As previously stated, ‘Configure Mailbox’ option enables you to set up the processes that emails can be in. Essentially, every new email that is received will have the status of ‘Unprocessed’. This is the default process that can’t be changed. You can also add number of other processes that email can be part of, and set the color for it.

Every email will have a label on it displaying the process that email is currently in. You can change the process on the email itself.

Shared Email Manager (Mailbox)

Now when you have everything configured, you can go ahead and click on ‘Mailbox’ button on the Shared Email Manager detail view.

All the emails sent to the email account (inbound email) you connected your mailbox with will be shown here. We’ll now explain all the pieces that mailbox is consisted from.

In the upper left corner next to the ‘Mailbox’ title, there’s a dropdown where you can toggle between all the mailboxes you have access to. Dropdown button itself is displaying the name of current mailbox.

Below that is the ‘Search emails’ section, which can help you with the search for an email by email subject, sender’s address and email’s state (the process email is currently in).

Under the search section there is a scrollable list view where all the emails are displayed. Please note that unread emails are displayed with blue stripe on the left of the ‘email card’. Once read, this stripe will disappear. Card of the email that is currently displayed in detail section is displayed with a blue stripe on the right of the card. These cards provide you with important information on email sender, subject, date and time received as well as to whom the email is assigned to. Please note that email is automatically assigned to the least busy user from the list of users that are related to the mailbox that email was sent to. In other words, every new email will be assigned to a user from the users subpanel on mailbox (please see ‘Configuring a Mailbox’ section for more details), which has the least emails assigned to him. Email cards are also displaying the process (stage) the email is currently in.

The area that takes central and right part of the screen displays the content of email selected from the list on the left (please see the image below). Actual email is showed in the ‘Current Email’ section. Your replies to the email are shown stacked on top of ‘Current Email’ section, newest one first, and each of the replies has ‘Replied email’ in the section name.

Actions that you can perform on the email are the following:

• Change State: enables you to move the email to other process (stage), or remove the process label (by selecting the empty value from the dropdown which appears after the click on button).

• Create Record: displays a list of options (Note, Task, Case, Contact, Opportunity and Lead) in the form of a dropdown. Click on each of the items will display a create view, so you can create a record related to the email. Once created, record will be shown under ‘Records related to email’ section. Please note that these related items are grouped by type (e.g. all contacts are grouped together), and that they’re clickable (they link to the created record).

• Re-assign user: allows you to assign the email to other user. You can select from the list of users allowed to use this mailbox (users that appear in already mentioned users subpanel on mailbox).

• Reply All, Reply and Forward actions will pull down compose email drawer, with some pre-populated data. Populated data depends on desired action, and is data that is normally populated when such actions are called in every email client (e.g. reply will copy the subject with added ‘Re:’ etc). Please note that Reply All button is visible on the screen, while Reply and Forward are set as dropdown items and can be clicked on after clicking on arrow next to the said button.

Each of 3 actions will display the compose email view. The most important thing to notice here is the ‘From’ field. This is where outbound email configuration comes into play. All related OE accounts will be shown in this field to select from.