Email Notifications
Using Continia Document Capture, you can make sure that approvers are notified by email whenever they need to carry out an approval action in Document Capture or the Continia Web Approval Portal, such as approving, rejecting, or canceling a document. You can notify the approvers either manually or automatically using job queues.
If necessary, you can customize the actual emails as you please, and it's also possible to set up reminder emails in order to escalate the importance of having documents approved.
Note
In order for Document Capture to be able to send notification emails, you must configure an email account first. You can do this using the assisted setup guide:
- Choose the
icon, enter Set up email, and then choose the related link. - Follow the on-screen instructions to set up the email account.
To send status emails manually
You can easily send status emails to approvers whenever you find it necessary to notify them that there are documents pending their approval. To do this, follow these steps:
- In the Role Center, go to Continia Document Capture Activities.
- Under Actions, select Send Status email to Approvers.
Emails are now sent to all approvers that have pending approval requests. Each email will contain a table with all documents pending approval and a link to the approval client that the recipient of the email has been configured to use for approving documents (either Document Capture or the Web Approval Portal). The approval client will then display all remaining approval requests that haven't already been taken care of for that day.
Note
Whenever a status email is sent to an approver, this is logged by Document Capture, which uses the information to determine when to send out additional notifications: The first time the status-email process is run on any given day – whether manually or automatically using job queues – an email containing all documents pending approval from the approver is sent to that approver. However, any subsequent process runs on the same day will only result in the sending of status emails to the approver if new approval requests involving that approver have been added since the first process run.
To send status emails using job queues
It's also possible to have status emails sent to approvers automatically using job queues, so you don't have to worry about notifying the approvers manually yourself.
For more information and details on how to do this, see Setting up Job Queues.
In order to avoid duplicate notifications, we recommend that you disable the standard Microsoft Dynamics NAV/Business Central notifications. Otherwise, Document Capture and NAV/Business Central will both notify approvers repeatedly about the same approval requests.
Note
In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2021 release wave 2 (BC v19) and later, you can disable standard notifications using a dedicated Microsoft event. This isn't possible in earlier versions, so for these you'll have to minimize the number of standard NAV/Business Central notifications instead (this link is only available to Continia partners).
As an alternative, Document Capture 2022 R1 and later versions will feature functionality that enables you to configure the application so that it doesn't send standard notifications at all.
As with the manual method described above, each email that's sent using a job queue will contain a table with all documents pending approval and a link to the approval client that the recipient of the email has been configured to use for document approval (Document Capture or the Web Approval Portal), and the approval client will display all remaining approval requests for that day.
To customize notification emails
You can easily customize certain parts of the emails that are sent to approvers, including their default subject lines and the actual text they contain.
To customize notification emails, follow these steps:
Choose the
icon, enter Document Capture Setup, and then choose the related link.On the General FastTab, under Purchase Approval, select the field to the right of Status to open the Document Capture Setup / Purchase Approval page.
Under Email Setup, fill in the fields as needed.
Optional: If you want to import a custom HTML template with, for example, different text and formatting than the default template, go to the action bar and select Status Email > Import Template > Choose, and then open the HTML template that you want to import.
Tip
The Document Capture installation package comes with a status email HTML template that you can edit and use as a basis for your own custom template. It can be found here: [drive]\Support Files\Document Capture\Other.
Note that if you do create your own custom template, you must keep the two keywords #DOCUMENTS# and #APPROVALFORMLINK#. When creating the notification email, Document Capture will replace these two keywords with a list of all relevant documents for approval and a link to the relevant approval client.
Note
If you don't import your own custom HTML template, Document Capture will use the default template, which has been hardcoded in a text variable in the CDC Purch. Approval E-Mail codeunit.
In case a custom template has previously been imported and you wish to use the default template instead, you can delete the imported template by following these steps:
- On the Document Capture Setup / Purchase Approval page, in the action bar, select Actions > Email > Delete Template.
- A dialog box asks if you want to delete the template. Select Yes to delete the previously imported template and revert to the default.
To set up reminder emails
If you want to add an extra level of urgency to the notification emails that are sent to approvers, you can set up one or more customized reminder emails in which you stress that it's important for the recipients to approve all pending documents.
Anything you enter when setting up reminder emails as described below – for example, the body text or subject lines of reminder emails – will overwrite whatever you might have configured on the Document Capture Setup / Purchase Approval page as described above.
To set up reminder emails, follow these steps:
Choose the
icon, enter Approval Reminder Email Setup, and then choose the related link.In the action bar, select New to create a new reminder email entry.
In the Level column, specify the level of the reminder by entering an integer. As the Level column determines the order in which reminder emails are sent out, the first level is typically labeled 1, and any subsequent levels are then labeled with consecutive numbers (2, 3, etc.).
In the Due Date Calculation column, enter the amount of time that should pass before a reminder email is sent out at this level (calculated from the moment the approval request was sent to the approver).
Note
Your entry must be an integer followed by D (days), WD (weekdays), W (weeks), M (months), Q (quarters), or Y (years) – for example, 2W (two weeks). For more advanced formulas, you can also use the mathematical symbols + and –, or you can enter the letter C (current) as a prefix to any of the previously mentioned time units – for example, CM+10D (current month plus ten days).
Optional: In the Send CC to column, specify if you want to have reminder email copies sent to the manager of either the current approver or the original approver.
Optional: In the Send CC to User ID column, enter the ID of any other user that you want to receive copies of reminder emails.
In the Email Subject column, enter the text to be displayed in the subject line of all reminder emails sent at this level.
Optional: If you want to customize the body text of any of the reminder emails, select the relevant reminder level, go to the action bar, select Beginning Text and/or Ending Text, and enter the text you want to have displayed in the body of all reminder emails sent at this level.
Note
Reminder emails are sent per document, not as a list including all documents that need to be approved. Keep this in mind when setting up reminder emails.