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Team Mailboxes

Tags : OpenNTF Template
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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...

Comments

Gravatar Image1 - Using a normal (or ONTF version) Mailbox also works, you just need to set the owner to the Mail-In Record (either by hacking the Template to work around the default validation or just use a tool, but the last will prevent changes to teh signature...).

Unfortunatelly the Team Mailbox lacks all the goodies of the normal ONTF Mailbox Emoticon. You also can't use it from offline clients, as you mail won't get replicated from the local mail.box to the server Emoticon

Gravatar Image2 - But a normal mailbox adds the 'Sent By' bit which is what teamMailBo gets around, also the TeamMailBox does work offline, there is specific code in the sending routines to make sure stuff in the local mail.box will ge to the server.

Tea Mailbox also has signature support with a nice substitution rule that can insert the seners actual name into the signature.

Gravatar Image3 - I can't say enough good things about this template - it rocks! The widest deployed template after Mail.ntf here.

Gravatar Image4 - Ok, seems that I have to pick the sending code for my other project, which also adds stuff directly to the mail.box Emoticon

Gravatar Image5 - When you forward a message with the normal mail box the copy of the sent message is saved in your own Sent folder not in the normal box. Do you know if TeamMailBox saves the forwarded messages in the TeamMailBox's Sent folder?