Post office configuration

Overview

You can configure the post office to collect similar notifications over an interval of time. The configuration combines those multiple emails into one notification that is then sent to a user. In the workflow designer, you use the Group E-mail Topic field in each manual activity definition to determine similar tasks to group email notifications.

Assume that the post office is enabled. If the manual activities that generate notifications have the Use Group E-mail Topic option enabled, the post office intercepts email notifications that the system generates for those manual activities. The post office holds the notifications for a specified interval. When that interval expires, the post office uses the aggregate email template to aggregate all notifications that have the same Group E-mail Topic value into one email message for each email recipient. The preferred locate of the recipient, which is specified in the Person object, is honored. This process reduces the volume of individual email messages for notifications of the same Group E-mail Topic value that a user receives.

The post office uses the Group E-mail Topic value on the Notification tab of the manual activity configuration page, to determine which messages to aggregate together. All notifications that are generated with the same Group E-mail Topic value are aggregated together for the collection interval specified. This field can be any string, but the default is the Activity ID. This field accepts JavaScript and dynamic content tags, if it results in the execution of a string.

Assume that the collection interval expires and notifications are aggregated. If there is only one notification for a specified Group E-mail Topic value and email address, that message is sent in its original form. The post office email template is not applied. Although the notification is sent in its original form, the notification is delayed until the post office collection interval expires.

There might be errors while attempting to aggregate the individual emails. The messages are sent in their original form and an error message is written to the log. The process means that notifications might be delayed in getting sent, but not result in the loss of any notifications. The Test button on the Post Office page is useful for troubleshooting template errors.

Example email notification

The default template generates an email notification similar to this message:

Subject: You have 3 work items requiring your attention.

Body:
You have 3 work items requiring your attention.

Here are the email subjects:
This is subject 1
This is subject 2
This is subject 3

Here are the email message bodies:
This is the text body 1
This is the text body 2 
This is the text body 3

The template can consist of any valid dynamic content tag and JavaScript code. In addition, the post office has a set of custom dynamic content tags and JavaScript extensions.