Comprehensive request to re-engineer all of the Email actions and components in Kinetic

Kinetic ERP
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TDLR warning - this attachment is a LONG read.
Control the Outbound Communication.docx (29.5 KB)

Synopsis:
Since Insights, and technically before, a few of us have been talking about the mess that is the email communications and file-sending capabilities inside Kinetic.

BPMs, Alerts, Custom Code (by so many of us here), Document Sender CSG add-on, Advanced Print Routing, etc. are the proverbial “more than one way to cook an egg” and with technology, privacy, and cybersecurity rules changing every day it seems, these tools we have need to catch up - and in my opinion - be 100% unified into a Kinetic subsystem available at all points within the platform.

There is so much more to it - languages, templates, mailing lists - and I think we addressed them all inside the document, so have a read when you have the time.

Request:
This is here for discussion, but not to dictate the solution - that is Epicor’s purview and responsibility. They have to pay for, and make back, the R&D expense, so they get to decide the HOW.

This is here to compile additional items, feedback on items, and to build a business case for Epicor to do the work.

I was going to drop this as an Idea, but it’s too much. If this is well received, then we’ll add some names form Epicor to it and see how they wish to handle it.

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If it helps gain visibility, you could plop a post in today’s Frideas and guide people to THIS post for discussion on this particular topic.

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Done - thanks!

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Not quite sure if it ties into this exactly, but our CSR’s practically live out of the email system, so the complete lack of integration with email in the Epicor CRM system is a pain point.

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And I would expand this to all types of notifications. Sure, the AOL generation wants email, but the youngsters might want a Teams or Slack message. And sometimes these are actionable items, and an email is just a notification and doesn’t give the user the ability to complete the task. Also, Email (or SSMS) is a wildly insecure channel and ripe for abuse.

Just food for thought…

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I think some of our customers are undead, they send PO’s via fax :dizzy_face:

Not all emails are strictly notifications, if you can reply back “approved” and have the PO get approved. Or some of these google doc emails let you resolve a comment from the email.

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True, one could use something like Adaptive Cards in an email, but also other messaging containers like SMS or messages. I know that Automation Studio has something like this for approving POs.

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We are also heavily vested in collaborate notifications now, as collaborate has gotten better and better; what would be a fairly easy thing to do, from the collaborate side, is add a feature to also sent an email out if a collaborate notification is triggered.

We currently have this programmed into a number of our collaborate notifications that are custom made for us, but it’s a rather long and messy process. We are getting better at it.

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YARN | You should've sent me a wuphf. A what? | The Office (2005) - S07E09 WUPHF.com | Video clips by quotes | b60d7255 | 紗

Ryan was ahead of his time: youtube

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season 4 driven to tears GIF by SpongeBob SquarePants

There should be the ability to delay sending either by a time limit to give users a chance to fix an error before sending OR by just creating a draft so it can be reviewed or personalized.

And it should work from any Epicor product…

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I agree completely! It is amazing to me that with such a robust system, email functionality is so weak! We would love to see complete integration with Microsoft Office 365. We are just looking for the simple things like emailing quotes, invoices, etc. to our customers within Kinetic while integrating our contact list, email signatures, etc. from O365.

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