Hey folks,
I've read articles on setting up incoming email, but unfortunately,
those alone doesn't quite address the issue I have at hand.
My sales team wants to be able to re-route emails to a WSS 3.0 list of
corporate contacts. The goal is to be able to automatically see email
correspondence with a contact at the click (or 2 clicks) of a button.
Presently, they acheive this with Salesforce.com, but we're planning
on kicking that service to the curb and using WSS exclusively for our
sales and delivery pipeline.
We're presently running a one-server Windows 2003 environment that has
AD, Exchange, and WSS 3.0 all installed in one place. That creates
problems when dealing with Implementation 1, below, but I've found
solutions for creating a new SMTP server elsewhere on this forum.
Implementation 1 - Use WSS's built-in Incoming Mail feature:
I imagine I'd have to create a custom form in Outlook 2003 (our
currently installed version on all machines) that would allow the user
to perform a WSS contact list DB lookup and click a button to route
the mail to the WSS email doc library with the appropriate metadata.
Unfortunately, the alternative of creating a separate doc library for
each contact isn't feasible, as there are a few hundred listings.
Implementation 2 - Ad-hoc workaround:
Another idea is extending the previously-described Outlook form to
save the email as a .txt document directly to the WSS doc library,
appending the proper metadata for easy searching/sorting. This way, I
don't have to deal with configuring a separate SMTP server or AD
contacts. We're really only concerned with the email's text, anyway,
so text files with metadata seem to satisfy the requirements here.
Bad idea?
Has anyone implemented something like this previously so I don't kill
myself reinventing the wheel? It seems like a pretty common issue
that developers would face, hence my query. And I might be getting a
bit ahead of myself, as I haven't looked into creating custom forms in
Outlook at all yet...my "solutions" might just be pipe dreams at this
point!
I know that Exchange and Office 2007 have all sorts of neat new
features that seamlessly integrate with MOSS 2007, but we don't have
the budget for ANY of that new software (or extra hardware). I'm
painted into a corner with WSS 3.0, Exchange and Office 2003 on ONE
server. Any help that you can provide is greatly appreciated!
Thanks!!
John
|
Similar Threads
