Approve Request Directly from Email

Candice_Yeudall

I have seen some attempts made at this when searching on-line but have not been able to find a fully working example. I would like to be able to have a link or button in an email that is send to a user's manager or whomever can approve or reject a request without having to login the to the Portal and try to navigate to the review activity. Has anyone looked at doing this and if so any luck?

seth_coussens

I'm not sure I entirely understand the exact requirements here, but I'll venture a few possible solutions.

One solution is to use the exchange connector, which allows you to approve or deny an activity through email by including the [approve] or [deny] tags in the body of the email response that contains the [RA#] tag in the subject line. You can then spruce up the notification email with HTML and add some buttons for approve and deny so that when clicked they bring up a new email response with the appropriate information already in the subject line and the body of the email and all you have to do is hit send.

If you are looking for a portal integration that gives you the ability to more easily approve or deny review activities that have been assigned to you as a user without having to search through what could be a large number of activities in an activity tree for an SR, we are working on something like that currently that will be released in the future as a free extension for the portal.

If I'm not quite answering your question or you want to expand upon it further, please let me know!

Michael_Baldry

We have something similar to this set up in our environment. There's no way (as far as I know) to directly approve it right from an email button, but you can set it up to do essentially the same thing by using a mailto link. There are 3 parts to it:

1. Setting the Exchange Connector up to listen for specific keywords
Inside the Exchange Connector settings, you can set up the "Review Activity approved parsing keyword" and "Review activity rejected parsing keyword" boxes to listen for a specific, ideally uncommon phrase (so that it wouldn't be used in a regular email). You can do similar things for marking other work items types completed/resolved here too.


2. Sending the approval/rejection email to the right place
You'll need to decide who needs to review each activity. If you're specifically looking to get the requestor's manager to review any requests they put in, you can check the "Line Manager Should Review" box in the RA in the template. That will cause SCSM to go out and find the user's manager (using the Manager field from AD, so you need that set up properly too), and then insert them as a reviewer on the activity.

You then need to set up some way to notify the reviewer. You could do this with a built-in notification subscription, but we just use the Cireson Notify Analyst app, and enable the two Review Activity workflows.

3. Allowing the reviewer to approve or reject without having to go to the portal
In the notification template that you use for the Notify Analyst app (or for your custom subscription), we make two links at the bottom of the email:
<a href="mailto:YourServiceManagerEmailAddress@Here.com?subject=[$Context/Property[Type='CustomSystem_WorkItem_Library!System.WorkItem']/Id$]&body=%23Approved"]><b>Approve</b></a>
<a href="mailto:YourServiceManagerEmailAddress@Here.com?subject=[$Context/Property[Type='CustomSystem_WorkItem_Library!System.WorkItem']/Id$]&body=%23Rejected"]><b>Reject</b></a>

People who receive the email can click the link, put in any notes (optional), and then click send. The Exchange Connector workflows will pick it up and mark it Approved or Rejected within a minute or so. You can customize the template to look however you want, or to include a pre-canned message. The important part is that you keep the WorkItem ID in the subject, and keep your parsing keywords in the body.

seth_coussens

I'm not sure I entirely understand the exact requirements here, but I'll venture a few possible solutions.

One solution is to use the exchange connector, which allows you to approve or deny an activity through email by including the [approve] or [deny] tags in the body of the email response that contains the [RA#] tag in the subject line. You can then spruce up the notification email with HTML and add some buttons for approve and deny so that when clicked they bring up a new email response with the appropriate information already in the subject line and the body of the email and all you have to do is hit send.

If you are looking for a portal integration that gives you the ability to more easily approve or deny review activities that have been assigned to you as a user without having to search through what could be a large number of activities in an activity tree for an SR, we are working on something like that currently that will be released in the future as a free extension for the portal.

If I'm not quite answering your question or you want to expand upon it further, please let me know!

Michael_Baldry

We have something similar to this set up in our environment. There's no way (as far as I know) to directly approve it right from an email button, but you can set it up to do essentially the same thing by using a mailto link. There are 3 parts to it:

1. Setting the Exchange Connector up to listen for specific keywords
Inside the Exchange Connector settings, you can set up the "Review Activity approved parsing keyword" and "Review activity rejected parsing keyword" boxes to listen for a specific, ideally uncommon phrase (so that it wouldn't be used in a regular email). You can do similar things for marking other work items types completed/resolved here too.


2. Sending the approval/rejection email to the right place
You'll need to decide who needs to review each activity. If you're specifically looking to get the requestor's manager to review any requests they put in, you can check the "Line Manager Should Review" box in the RA in the template. That will cause SCSM to go out and find the user's manager (using the Manager field from AD, so you need that set up properly too), and then insert them as a reviewer on the activity.

You then need to set up some way to notify the reviewer. You could do this with a built-in notification subscription, but we just use the Cireson Notify Analyst app, and enable the two Review Activity workflows.

3. Allowing the reviewer to approve or reject without having to go to the portal
In the notification template that you use for the Notify Analyst app (or for your custom subscription), we make two links at the bottom of the email:
<a href="mailto:YourServiceManagerEmailAddress@Here.com?subject=[$Context/Property[Type='CustomSystem_WorkItem_Library!System.WorkItem']/Id$]&body=%23Approved"]><b>Approve</b></a>
<a href="mailto:YourServiceManagerEmailAddress@Here.com?subject=[$Context/Property[Type='CustomSystem_WorkItem_Library!System.WorkItem']/Id$]&body=%23Rejected"]><b>Reject</b></a>

People who receive the email can click the link, put in any notes (optional), and then click send. The Exchange Connector workflows will pick it up and mark it Approved or Rejected within a minute or so. You can customize the template to look however you want, or to include a pre-canned message. The important part is that you keep the WorkItem ID in the subject, and keep your parsing keywords in the body.

Candice_Yeudall

Actually love the sound of the second option.

What I am looking for in the email is that if the reviewer clicks on approve it would register in the RA as an approval or if they click on reject the RA will record the rejection and then move on to the next task.