Configuring your e-mail notifications for the Managed Review & Approval Solution Accelerator

The Managed Review & Approval Solution Accelerator is a powerful tool that easily increases the efficiency of conducting reviews and approvals within your team or in external circumstances. Part of the out-of-the-box functionality of the Managed Review & Approval Solution Accelerator is the auto-generated email notifications that keep the initiator, approvers and reviewers in the review aware of the review's progress. This is a very convenient feature but it has the potential to overwhelm email inboxes and inadvertently encourage people to disregard the notifications. In this tutorial, I will outline possible solutions to modify the default email settings to allow you to make the most of the Managed Review & Approval's capabilities.

This portion will direct to change the sender address of the email notifications.

Find the configuration to change the Sender Address for Notifications

1. Open Workbench and login to your LiveCycle server using proper credentials.

1. Select Window > Show View > Components.
2. Choose the ReviewCommentingApproval Component and expand.
3. Expand Active Services and right-click ReviewCommentingAndApprovalService:1.0 and select Edit Service Configuration….

1. Within the Configuration Settings window, edit the 'From address of the email notification emails:' to a desired email to change the sender of the notifications

Find the configuration to change the sender address for Task Assignments

1. Open the Administration Console in a browser and login. For example, http://lcservername:8080/adminui.
2. Select Services > LiveCycle Process Management ES2 > Server Setting > Email Settings.

1. In Email Setting you are able to indicate whether you want an email for Task Assignments, from which address and service the email are sent from.
2. If you retract to Server Setting and select Task Notifications you are then able to set the contents of the message and have the ability to enable and disable different kinds of notifications.

Note: More explanation is provided in the LiveCycle Process Management documentation linked to at the bottom.

The messages that we are about to configure are sent out in the SendNotification process when an Event is triggered. You can find all the events in ReviewCommentingAndApproval/#/events folder. Events are xml files that thrown during certain process and then received by another. The receiver is then able to access the xml data that is specific to that event.

1. Open Workbench and login to your LiveCycle server using proper credentials.
2. Select File >Get Application… and choose:

• ManagedReviewAndApproval
• ManagedReviewAndApproval-Sample
• ReviewCommentingAndApproval

Note: If these applications are not available access the adminui. Follow Services/ Applications and Services / Application Management and select Import. Generally it will be located [SolutionTemplateRoot]/deploy to locate ManagedReviewAndapproval and ManagedReviewAndApproval – Sample. To locate the ReviewCOmmentingAndApproval Application you should be able find it under this root: [LCROOT]\Adobe LiveCycle ES2\sa_resources\SA_SDK_9.5\BuildingBlocks\ReviewCommentAndApproval\lca.

You are now ready to start customizing.

Customize the message

The customization of the subject and body of the email notifications will allow the user to make the most of the reminders. For example, the user can customize the body to contain a link to the location of the review or can provide a personalized message with task instructions. The subject and body fields of the emails are populated by templates located in ReviewCommentingAndApproval/ReviewCommentingAndApproval/# under resources > templates > email > notification.

To edit the templates, open the desired template with the Text Editor and use the CSS classes and HTML to modify your message. After you are finished save and check in the template. To put your changes into effect ensure to deploy the ReviewCommentingAndApproval application after checking in.

Filtering techniques

Template removal

This solution requires the removal of the email templates used to auto-generate the emails. The removal causes no obvious consequences to the user however it will cause a error log to be recorded in the server.log. Be sure to create and deploy a new Application Version the delete the templates to prevent any permanent loss of data.

1. Open Workbench and login.
2. Locate the ReviewCommentingAndApproval application create your new Application Version and expand: resources > templates > email > notification.
3. For each notification there is a subject and a body. Delete the pair for each notification you don't want to receive.
4. Right-click on your ReviewCommentingAndApproval/# application version and select Deploy.

Process modification

This solution is recommended because it does not cause error logs. In addition this solution provides more granular control over the email messages. However a solid knowledge of Workbench process creation is required. A new Application version is not as necessary as in Solution One but is still good practice to prevent any permanent data loss.

1. Open Workbench and login.
2. Locate the ReviewCommentingAndApproval application create your new Application Version and expand: processes >notification and double click the SendNotification process to open it in the Process Designer.

1. Check out the Send Notification process and you will be creating a 'if' structure to filter. Use a decision point as many decisions points as desired removed notifications and one Set Value action that will do nothing.
2. Place the Decision Points in a line and connect them all together in one direction. Allow the process to continue to the next Decision Point or SendMail if the 'onEvent' variable does not equal the Event string you do not want. If it does, it will take the route to the dummy action.

1. Save and check in your changes
2. Right-click on your ReviewCommentingAndApproval/# application version and select Deploy.

To learn more, refer to the following documentation:

• Customizing the Solution Template for Managed Review & Approval Solution Accelerator 9.5
• Managed Review & Approval Solution Accelerator 9.5
• Configuring LiveCycle Process Management Documentation: Configuring Server Settings