Team Mailboxes
Monday, January 5, 2009 3:12 PM
One thing I have come across in all the different organizations I have either worked for or I have done consultancy gigs at is the need for generic mailboxes that can be accessed by multiple people. Common examples of this would be a mailbox for Sales or HR.
When creating these mailbox you have the option of registering a new user in the NAB which will create a new ID file and a new mail file. Then you can open that mail file up to the people who need access with a few ACL adjustments and then the staff will be able to see the emails that the mail file has received and they can send emails from that mail file, however all emails sent will always have the 'Sent By' moniker attached to them.
Another option is a fantastic Open Source template available from OpenNTF called 'Domino TeamMailBox' by Brian Green. This template has been around for a good few years and was distributed on Brian's website long before it was put on OpenNTF.
With TeamMailBox you create a new database based on this template on your server and then create a Mail-In Database record in your NAB to point to the database. You can give this mail-in record any email address you like ( as long as it doesn't clash with an existing email address of course ) and then you adjust the ACL to grant the required people access to the mail file. Then it's a simple job of setting the configuration document in the new TeamMailBox with the name of the mailbox and the email address and now when people send out emails it will show that it is from that email address and it will not add the 'Sent By' bit to the email.
There are also two scheduled agent in the TeamMailBox, one to send auto replies to received emails. This could be handy for the likes of a HR database that sends back a message to say your query has been received and the second agent is a notification agent that can send an email to all the members of that HR team to let them know a new message is waiting to be looked at. I particularly like the notification agent as I know that sometimes staff do not bother to look in the shared mailbox ever day and this will stop an email from sitting in there unnoticed for any period of time.
We have recently started using this template here at work and I have made a few code adjustments that allows you to have multiple email addresses associated with a single TeamMailBox with the option to send emails from any of the associated addresses. Hopefully this extra functionality will end up on OpenNTF soon...