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Bulk Communications

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• Bulk Communications Tool

Overview

The bulk communications tool allows multiple emails, faxes and SMS messages to be queued in taskmaster through a single interface. It also allows diary notes and diary actions to be added. The tool can be launched from the reservations, organisations and people list views. The list view used determines the recipient addresses and communincation methods available. The following table shows which communication methods are available from each launch point and the source of the recipient details.

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Bulk Communications Tool

To launch the tool, right click on two or more selected rows in the list view and select the bulk communication option form the context menu. The selected rows do not have to be continuous. Simply use the standard Control and Shift methods to select the rows and then right click on one of the selected rows to show the context menu.

Launching bulk communications from the organisations list view.

The recipients tab shows all the selected rows that launched the tool. Individual recipients can be added or removed with the checkbox. Any recipient which does not have the required data for the selected communication type will be highlighted with a strong and forceful shade of man salmon.

The organisation recipients tab. Email is the current communication type so those organisations without an email address are highlighted.

The communication tab contains all the fields for creating email, fax and SMS messages. It also allows selection of a template which will populate the subject and message with predefined content. The diary tab allows diary notes to be created and diary actions to be scheduled. The subject and message from the communication tab can also be appended to the diary note.

Once the messages, attachments, notes and actions have been configured, clicking send will show a verification dialog with a summary of all the actions that are about to occur.

The bulk communication verification dialog. Pay close attention to these numbers when they appear as they are not simply decorative. Ask yourself: "Do I really want to send 7 megabytes of atrociously captioned cat pictures to 2487 recipients?"

Once confirmed a new dialog will open showing the approximate progress. If any errors occur or the cancel button is pressed, all actions will be rolled back. All actions must complete successfully before the resulting database records are committed.

A potentially spamtastic mistake in progress. Quick! Press Cancel!

Bulk Communication Template Variables

To assist with writing content applicable to the context, there is a set of predefined variables available that can be added as tags to the communication subject and message. These tags should be contained within greater than and less than signs and are evaluated when sending and replaced with the appropriate value.

If you have selected a template other than "Freeform Subject and Message" then additional tags may be available through a template query. eg. If the template query returns a field STRPAXNAME then this can be used as a tag in the subject or message.

select * from tblLkp_Data where strTableName = 'bulktemplate';

It is important to note that the tag replacement code will always use the first row from the query result. The query writer must ensure that the query returns rows in the correct order or always returns a single row. There is no easy way to provide generic documentation for this as each client may have different templates and the queries may return different columns.

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