Setting Up Email to Communicate Community Activities

Step 1: Enter Sending Email Address Information

IMPORTANT: You must have permission to edit files on the Ektron server to complete this step.

The siteroot/web.config file collects the outgoing email address information. To define the "From:" address of community email sent from your website:

1. On the server that hosts your website, open the siteroot/web.config file with a text editor (such as Notepad).
2. Find the section below the <notificationAgent> <providers> elements.
3. Define the following elements. Do not change other elements in that section.
   • smtpServer—Enter the name of the server that hosts your Ektron website.
   • smtpPort—Enter the port that sends outgoing email from the site.
   • username—Optionally, enter the username to authenticate against the smtp server.
   • password—Optionally Enter the password to authenticate against the smtp server.
   • from Email—Enter the “from” email address of all outgoing community email. When a recipient gets an email, this value appears in the From: field.

Step 2: Review the Community Activity Notification Message

Ektron provides a message that is emailed when each community activity is completed. To view the message in the Workarea, choose Settings > Community Management > Notifications > Messages and click Email Message Reply.

Step 3: Set Up email Preferences

Ektron provides a default set of notifications that apply to all newly-created users. This step is almost exactly the same as Setting Default Notification Preferences.

Step 4: Set up the email Reply Feature

The optional email Reply feature consists of additional text in a community notification that prompts a recipient to reply, as shown in the following example.

If the recipient replies, the resulting email is posted to the group's message board.

IMPORTANT: The Community email Reply feature is only available with group activities, such as uploading a document to a group workspace. It is not available with user activities.
Also, you must enable the community notification features as described in Setting Up Email to Communicate Community Activities.

1. From the Workarea, choose Settings > Community Group > Notifications > Settings.
2. Specify the email address to receive email replies in the Edit Notification Settings screen. (You must be a member of the Administrators group or the community group administrator to do this.)
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   • Enable Email Replies—Check this box to access the fields in the lower part of the screen.
   • Email Account Name—Enter the address that receives email delivered to your website. The email account must be the same as the account used to send email. See Also: Step 1: Enter Sending Email Address Information

     IMPORTANT: Each community group's email address must be unique.

   • Email Account Password—Enter the password for that email address.
   • Email Server—Enter the POP mail server that retrieves email for this account.
   • Email Server Port—Enter the port number used to retrieve email for this account.
   • Use SSL—Check this box if you use SSL when retrieving email.
   • Test Connection—After you complete the above fields, click this button to verify the information and your ability to connect to the mail server.

     NOTE: If you are using Gmail as the SMTP server to fetch email replies, after the notification service processes the emails, you probably want to delete them from the Inbox. To set up automatic deletion of this email from the Inbox, got to Gmail's Settings screen > Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab > Pop Download Area > 2. When messages are accessed with POP > select delete Gmail's copy.
     
     

Step 5: Review the email Reply Message

Community activity that generates an email also can include a reply statement, as shown in the following example.

NOTE: The activity message text is determined by the activity. For example, if the activity is a blog post, the message text is retrieved from the New Blog Post notification message.

To review and modify email reply text:

1. In the Workarea, choose Settings > Community Management > Notifications > Messages.
2. Click Email Message Reply.
3. You cannot edit the Title, Type, Sub Type or Default check box.
4. The Subject field is not used.
5. Edit the message text. You can create an HTML-based and a plain text message for each activity. Typically, HTML messages are sent as email or to the ActivityStream server control, while plain text is used in SMS style messages.

   The line of dashes separates the activity message from the email reply.

   Messages typically combine text and tokens, Ektron-defined variables surrounded by at signs (@). When a message is generated, tokens retrieve information about Ektron users, groups, and objects. See Also: Working with Tokens

6. Optionally change the Message's Start and End Delimiters. By default, the email message reply begins with a new line character and ends with the line of dashes you see in the message text. If desired, you can change those defaults. For example, you want to limit the reply to a single paragraph.
   1. On the server that hosts Ektron, open C:\program files\ektron\ektronnotificationservice\
ektron.notification.service.exe.config.
   2. Find the <siteNotification> <sites> element.
   3. Insert the following properties at the end of the <Add> tag.
      • replyStartDelimitter—marks the beginning of the reply
      • replyEndDelimitter—marks the end of the reply

      For example:

      <siteNotification> 
        <sites> 
          <add name="dev" url="http://localhost/eintranet"
            connectionString="server=.;database=eintranet;
            Integrated Security=TRUE;user=;pwd=;" services="All" 
         replyExtractor="Ektron.Notification.Service.EktronReplyExtractor" 
            replyStartDelimitter="^" replyEndDelimitter="\r\n" /> 
        </sites> 
      </siteNotification>

      You use RegExregular expression; an alias that creates a pattern. For example, blogs.aspx?blogmonth=3&blogyear=2012&blogid=41 can be a RegEx blogs/2012/03/41. From that, a site visitor can infer blogs/2012/03/40 to see the previous post, or enter blogs/2012/03 to see all March 2012 posts expressions to indicate the start and end delimiters. In the above example, the start delimiter (^) is a new line, and the end delimiter (\r\n) is a page break. So, only the first paragraph in the email reply is used.

Step 6: Enable Attachments to Notifications

Ektron can attach assets to a notification. For example, a user uploads a PDF document to a group workspace, which generates a Group Content Added notification and attaches the asset. If you enable attachments and the email Reply feature, message recipients can:

• Download the attached asset to their computer.
• Modify it.
• Reply to the email .
• Attach the modified asset.

If they do, Ektron replaces the community group asset with the attached file.

If a group administrator does not want the revision, the administrator can use the asset history to restore the original asset. See Also: Restoring a Previous Version

IMPORTANT: If a message's email signature includes an image, the email Reply feature uploads it as a group asset. To avoid this, remove the image from the signature before replying.

To set up notification attachments for a community group:

1. From the community group page, click Edit Group.
2. Alternatively, in the Workarea, choose Settings > Community Management >Community Groups > click a community group.
3. Near the bottom of the screen, check the Attach Documents in Email Notifications box.
4. Click Save.

How email Replies are Handled

Activity notifications can prompt recipients to reply. The following table shows how each activity treats email replies.

NOTE: If you are in a load-balanced environment, the same reply may appear several times. If this problem occurs, stop the Ektron notification service on all but one of the servers in the cluster.

Creating an Email Address for a Community Group

You can set up Ektron's Community Feature to let anyone email a post to a community message board. To set this up, each community group administrator (or Ektron administrator) must define information about the receiving email account.

1. On community site's group page, choose Manage > Edit Group. The Edit Group screen appears.

   Alternatively, from the Workarea, choose Settings > Community Management > Community Groups. Click the group, then click its Properties tab and check the Enable Group emails checkbox.

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2. Enter the group's email address, account name and password.

Generating email Invitations for Community Management

The Community Platform’s email notification feature enables Ektron to generate email that invites other users to join a community group, join the site, or become a colleague.

To create a message:

1. In the Workarea, go to Settings > Community Management > Messages.
2. Click Add Email Message.
3. Enter a title that describes the message.
4. At the Type field, click the drop-down arrow to choose the message type.
5. Select whether to make the email message a Default message.
6. In the editor, enter the message text. Use the variables in the table below to retrieve information into the invitation.
7. Click Save.

Messages can include variables that retrieve information about the user sending the invitation or the link to join a group and display it in the message text.

Variables are surrounded by at signs (@). For example: @appSenderName@ displays the name of the user sending the invitation. In the email, this text might read:

Alan Administrator has invited you to join the Marketing Community Group.

You can use the following variables in the body of email notifications.

• @appOptionalText@—Text a user types into the Optional Message box on the Invite server control.
• @appSenderName@—The sender of the invitation
• @appFriendDisplayName@—The recipient's name.
• @appInvitedEmail@—The recipient's email address.
• @appInviteId@—Appends the invite ID to the registration URL. For example:

  Click <a href=http://www.example.com/register.aspx&fInvId=

@appInviteId@>here</a> to accept.

• @appGroupName@—The group a person is being invited to join.