Two-way e-mail

You can use e-mail for both inbound and outbound integration.

By sending an e-mail to the service desk, end-users or external systems can automatically log a new instance of a process, update one of their existing processes, or receive a status update for one of their processes. You can then design your processes and queries so that processes that are logged by e-mail appear in a consolidated list that can be triaged and processed as appropriate by your analysts.

In addition to responding to direct status update requests from end-users, the outbound aspects of e-mail integration provide the ability to update end-users or external systems with progress reports on their processes automatically by e-mail. For example, whenever a note is added to a request, or a request is resolved or progressed, the end-user can be automatically updated by e-mail. You can also configure Mail to automatically e-mail any attachments that exist on a process - for example, troubleshooting guides or documents that describe fixes - directly to the associated end-user.

For information about e-mail integration, see Mail.

In many cases, using e-mail as a two-way integration can be a simple and effective technique. However, for the best live integration with an external system, we recommend using Event Manager, as described in the following section.