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History: Groupmail

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Source of version: 20 (current)

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            ! Group Mail
Groupmail aims to provide a way for a team (a Tiki group) to process email contact requests, act on them and record the process in wiki pages. The feature started in ((Tiki3))/((Tiki4)) days, stopped working some years later, and it was brought back to life in ((Tiki20)).

There is significant work done for Tiki-Cypht in 21, 22, 23 so it's recommended to run the latest stable version of Tiki. (Or even trunk if you are a developer). Most enhancements and many fixes will not be backported as there are lots of changes. There has not been testing on Groupmail. Please report any issues.

!!# Installation
You need to follow the next steps.

!!# Since ((Tiki20))
http://profiles.tiki.org/Groupmail_20
Once you applied the profile and add an email account, you can access that email account through the groupmail feauture

The profile adds the following homepage to your tiki site, with a short overview of the whole feature:
{BOX()}__Welcome to Tiki GroupMail__ %%% %%%

__Here's what the profile did:__
* Made a new "Help Team" group that your GroupMail operators will need to be members of
* Made Trackers for extra user and group info (and attached them to the Help Team group
* Made a Tracker called "GroupMail Tickets" to store mails that are bring processed

%%% 
__Here are a few extra configurations that profiles can't manage yet:__
*You need to set up a webmail account - [tiki-webmail.php?locSection=settings|here]

__Usage tips__
* Don't forget to [tiki-admingroups.php?group=Help%20Team|add the users you want] (including yourself) to the "Help Team" group
{BOX}

{img src="display1678" link="display1678" width="400" rel="box[g]" imalign="center" desc="Click to expand" align="center" styleimage="border"}

!!-# Until ((Tiki19))
You need to apply the Groupmail profile
http://profiles.tiki.org/GroupMail

It adds the webmail-inbox module and makes a group (to share the mail, provided that you configured a  webmail account and make it __shared__). Then you can "take" mails from the inbox (others in the group can see who took it). 

The profile adds the following homepage to your tiki site, with a short overview of the whole feature:
{BOX()}__Welcome to Tiki GroupMail__ %%% %%%

__Here's what the profile did:__
* Enabled lots of features - including AJAX (which is slightly experimental and may affect other features)
* Made a new "Help Team" group that your GroupMail operators will need to be members of
* Made Trackers for extra user and group info (and attached them to the Help Team group
* Made a Tracker called "GroupMail Tickets" to store mails that are bring processed
* Added the Webmail Inbox module top left
* Shown you this page (which you can delete when you're finished with it)
%%% 
__Here are a few extra configurations that profiles can't manage yet:__
*You need to set up a webmail account - [tiki-webmail.php?locSection=settings|here]
** Some rather incomplete documentation on Tiki Webmail can be found [http://doc.tiki.org/Webmail|Webmail|here]
** __N.B.__ The only ''special'' thing you need for GroupMail is to set ''"Group (shared mail inbox) or private"'' to ''Group"

__Usage tips__
* Don't forget to [tiki-admingroups.php?group=Help%20Team|add the users you want] (including yourself) to the "Help Team" group
{BOX}

!!!# Create an shared webmail account

The webmail_inbox module can be updated live, or set to only refresh manually. 

In case there is no webmail account set yet, the module shows an initial message with a green arrow linking to the ((Webmail)) feature to allow you create one:

{img src="tiki-download_file.php?fileId=170" alt="tiki4_groupmail_inbox_module_0.png (6.28 Kb)" align=center}

Once at the webmail admin interface (__tiki-webmail.php__) go to setting and click on the tab: "__Create Account__" and fill in the required fields for your specific account, taking into account that you need to choose "__Group__" e-mail account in the setting at the bottom:

 
!!!# Add users to the "help team" group
You need to add users to the "Help team" group, in order to allow them selecting webmail accounts to use them for the groupmail feature.

In this example, user __john__ was added by user admin to the __Help team__ group.

!!!# Each user needs to select the group mail account
User john, after cliking to the green arrow shown on his webmail_inbox module on the left column, would be offered to chose which webmail account to validate to be shown in his own webmail_inbox module.


!!!# Basic functioning
The webmail_inbox module shows a list of messages, with:
{SPLIT()}
# The option to manually refresh the groupmail account for new messages
+
# The time since the email was received in HH:MM
+
# Who has "Taken" an email to work on
+ If nobody has taken that message yet, it has a "Take" button to allow the user to indicate that that user will start working on the email. The first time somebody clicks on the "Take" button, the communication log wiki page is created and a new record is added in the contact list regarding this user, of it was not existing previously. And if you already "took" that message from the webmail_inbox module, but you changed your mind, you can click again on your name, so that it will become take-able again by other people.
+
# The email address of the sender
+ If you click on the email address, you will be shown a wiki page with the log of all the communication held with that contact.  
+
# If there is a person icon next to the message, it means that there is a contact record for this person, the match is configurable on From address, specific string in subject, name search in message body.
+
# The subject of the message, which is a link to the message itself in the webmail feature, to allow easy and quick replying, forwarding, etc. 
---
{img src="tiki-download_file.php?fileId=192" alt="tiki4_groupmail_inbox_module_01b.png (107.96 Kb)" align=center width=250 }
{SPLIT}

!!! Review communication logs from that group mail account 
When you click on the email address in the webmail_inbox module, you wil be shown a wiki page displaying a log of all the communication held by all of your group your members with that contact (not fully implemented yet by the time ((Tiki4)).0 release).
 
^{img src="tiki-download_file.php?fileId=193" alt="tiki4_groupmail_contact_log_wikipage_00.png (37.65 Kb)" align=center}^

!!! Add contacts to contact list
The first time somebody click on the "Take" button from a new contact, a new record for that contact is added in the contact list. Since then, an icon will be shown next to the now hyperlinked email address shown in the webmail_inbox module.
 
When you click on the icon next to the email address in the webmail_inbox module, you will be shown that contact in the tiki contact list (addressbook), to further use in the webmail feature to easily add one or many people to the "to:" or "cc:" / "bcc:" fields.  

^{img src="tiki-download_file.php?fileId=194" alt="tiki4_groupmail_contact_example_00.png (32.75 Kb)" align=center} ^

!!! Check and Reply messages at the Webmail
If the message contains text and html parts, you will able to switch easily between them, or even looking at the source content (with full headers) of that email message.

^{img src="tiki-download_file.php?fileId=195" alt="tiki4_groupmail_webmail_example_00.png (57.12 Kb)" align=center} ^

Remember that you can reuse your contact list for easily and quickly adding contact to your replies or forwards of email messages. To do so you need to click on the  "to:" or "cc:" / "bcc:" fields. 


!!# More details
Two permissions need to be set in order to manage groups to use and admin the group mail feature:
||tiki_p_use_group_webmail  | Can use group webmail
tiki_p_admin_group_webmail | Can administrate group webmail accounts ||

More information on dev:((dev:groupmail))

-=Related=-
* ((PluginCypht))
* ((WebMail))
* http://dev.tiki.org/Groupmail
* http://profiles.tiki.org/GroupMail

-=Aliases=-
(alias(GroupMail)) | (alias(Group Mail)) | (alias(GroupWebMail))