Improving the appearance of your email
The administrator at XYZ is pleased by the response of the BMC Remedy AR System user community to the Email Engine. Users feel comfortable using email to query the AR System server and to submit and modify entries. However, he hears occasional grumbling in the hallway. Why is Email Engine so featureless? Can it not look more like email that comes from a favorite online auction website or online bookstore? the following figure illustrates a solution, showing how the Email Engine can assign HTML templates to outgoing email.
Templates dynamically assigned through workflow
(Click the image to expand it.) 
Realizing the importance of BMC Remedy AR System notifications, the administrator takes steps to replace the plain text email generated by the Email Engine. To improve its look and feel, he designs attractive HTML pages to use as header, footer, result, and content templates. He works with a graphic artist to create interesting bitmaps.
Most important, he designs a data-driven workflow that dynamically assigns the correct templates based on the ticket's impact. The templates are designed so that users can quickly tell whether a ticket's impact is urgent, high, medium, or low.
The following steps illustrate the scenario:
- Shelly is visiting an important client in Chicago. She needs information from the corporate website within the hour to close an important deal, but the web server is down and her web client keeps returning error messages. She composes an email with status marked Urgent and sends it to the Incoming mailbox.
- The Email Engine receives the email from the mail server. It parses the instructions in her email, and makes the appropriate API calls to the AR System server.
- The server fires a filter that triggers a Notify action. Under normal circumstances, email notifications are formatted with a standard HTML header and result template. But if a submission is marked Urgent, the filter workflow creates an email notification with the Urgent header template.
- The Email Engine constructs the message according to formatting instructions contained in the Outgoing Mailbox it is using. This message consists of the field values from the HD Incident form (submitter, short description, status, assignee, and so on) along with the header and reply templates that are stored by the AR System server in the AR System Email Templates form. The Email Engine then transmits the message to the mail server with instructions to send the message to Francie Frontline, the first-line Customer Support engineer.
- Francie Frontline logs in to the mail server to see if she has new mail. She sees the Urgent email constructed by the Email Engine. She clicks the URL in her email, and the ticket opens in her browser. Because the email is marked Urgent, its importance jumps to the top of her To Do list. She troubleshoots and quickly resolves the problem. When Francie marks the ticket as Fixed, the server fires a filter Notify action. Shelly then receives an email notification from the system that her web access problems have been solved. She can now access the information she needs to close her sale.
For more information, see Dynamically assigning templates to outgoing email.
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