Transcript
Yep. Okay, so we're good, I think. Yeah, Evan, I can't hear you at all. All right, I will get started then here. So, welcome everybody. Sounds like you guys can hear me, I believe. We're going to talk through a new feature that we have coming. We have it available for some partners, and kind of like a limited release here as we're kind of just verifying everything is working the way we expect before we go to everybody. So I'm just going to share out this slide. I don't want to present it in Teams. Sorry, wrong thing. I'm so used to Teams, I forget to switch to the right thing. Share screen. Yep. Share screen. Sorry. Well, I'm just gonna leave it like this. All right, so I'm going to go down, why did it skip me back up, here we go. So we're going to be talking through a new, basically a new version of an email connector that we are building out that will be integrating directly with the new Azure Workflow Engine. So I don't know how many of you have already played with the new Workflow Engine. But we'll go through kind of what this means here in a little bit. So for anyone who tried out the ASIO email connector that we tried to release a couple years ago, and have since taken down. One of the drawbacks we were going to have with that email connector is it was only going to work with ASIO directly or with cloud partners, whereas this will actually work for on prem or cloud. And on top of that, it technically doesn't even require PSA, which we'll go through as well. So just a little bit about where we're at. So as I mentioned, we're doing kind of a limited early access release right now. Just to kind of, you know, have some people pick out any obvious things or any issues that they're finding. There are some known limitations that we have today that we're well aware of are going to need to be resolved before everyone would want to start primary. I'll talk through a couple of those items. Get through that. Currently, we're targeting kind of a public early access release here in March, we'll probably still have some of those limitations. And then sometime in Q2 is when we kind of expect to have the full features that we're looking for to kind of give us the feature parity with with PSA, and then also having some additional features as well. So I'm going to go ahead and just flip over to. Can you guys all see PSA right now? Looks like you can. All right, so to start off with, you'll need with this system, it integrates currently only with Microsoft 365 for email. At some point, we will add Google support. No plans at any point here at this point to add IMAP or POP or any of those types of systems. But we are planning to add in the Google one at some point here, I just don't have an exact timeline of it. But how we set this up is pretty straightforward. We are using delegated permissions for anyone who knows Microsoft permissions. So you don't need to have like full access to everything. We're using delegated permissions so you can set this up ideally with a service account. But you'll just have to have permissions to that mailbox that you're trying to access. So you'll need to have like full read and write permissions to that mailbox, just like you would if you were trying to add like a shared mailbox. You can do this with shared mailboxes as well. You just won't be able to do the authentication with the shared mailbox. So I'd recommend setting up a service account for this. After you get authenticated here, you just choose which mailbox you want to monitor. So we just have a multi-select here. One of the known limitations that we have right now is we're kind of getting this all out the door is you can actually only get one mailbox. It'll let you select multiple, but right now it'll actually only work with one mailbox. We'll be adding support to add in multiple mailboxes in here in the near future and multiple tenants as well. Currently can only do one tenant. Tim, to answer your question, do you have to use this with ASIO? Can we use this with the old manage as well? So to set this up, you have to do it in ASIO, but on-premise partners do have access to this. If you don't already have access to it, you can request it. The ticketing system that it hooks to can be on-prem or cloud. That part doesn't matter. After you have this integrated in here, now you go over to the workflow side. We have built out a template. You can ignore most of these. We have a default template here. The purpose of this template is to try to mimic the behavior that we have in the PSA email connector. As you'll see, the workflow rule currently is pretty complicated. We'll go through. Some of this will be getting cleaned up as we continue. We're going to be building out an RPA bot for a couple of the pieces just to clean these things up. These bots are ones that we are building, though, so they're not ones that you would have to have a special license for or anything like that. Nor are we planning to put this behind some sort of special license for people. As long as you have access to email connector today, you'd have access to this. Just diving into this workflow rule, most of this is just the default rule settings from the template. I do have some documentation that I wrote up to go along with this that just walks you through every piece of this. At the top here, here is where we're just setting the trigger. The trigger is just like, what is it doing? In this case, we're just choosing what is the mailbox that we're monitoring. For now, this is my mailbox. Down here. This looks like a lot, and I get it. It is. Part of the reason some of this is taking quite a while and part of the reason that we're going to be doing some work to try to contain some of this in a bot. But most of this, if you want to try to keep the functionality that we have today, most of this you actually won't need to touch at all. There's only a couple of items that you'll want to touch. So this whole side, this side, for example, you could just ignore entirely because this is just handling how we renew that subscription with Microsoft. Most likely by the time we get this to full release, you won't even see this in here. This will be a whole separate thing. We have a watchdog type service that we are working on right now that will handle all of this and do some proactive testing and stuff like that as well. This area is an interesting one. I'm going to call this out here just because one of the issues that people have today with PSA is if you are talking to another ticketing system, let's just say another PSA ticketing system, both of them only work off of the subject line for the ticket number. So one system is going to kind of be stuck. So what you can do with this system, because we have a whole lot more information available to us, you'll be able to go ahead and parse out the body, the from address, the to address, obviously the subject line of the email. So you can do a variable check of the body of the email if you want to go ahead and say, all right, I want to look for some keyword in the body that says, hey, if it says, you know, PSA ticket number, blah, blah, blah, like, all right, grab whatever that number is. That's what I want to use as my ticket number for this. And so you can adjust this here to go ahead and use that a different thing. So the nice thing is, you don't have to. You can just leave what we have if you want to maintain what we have in PSA. But just to show you some of the options that we have in here today, and we're going to be adding more later, is, you know, we have the body, any CC emails that are on here, the from domain, as I mentioned, the from email. This is just the response code. You probably aren't going to use this for anything. Subject, and then the to email as well. So we're going to be adding in additional items, such as the message ID, which will help with the end reply to message ID. So if you run into that issue where you have somebody emailing their printer vendor and you, and then the printer vendor reply all, you can go ahead and actually grab that. How can we get early access? You can reach out to me after this, if it's something you're interested in. I'll be posting something on the virtual community as well to just gather people who are interested. And we can work on getting you guys added as well to that. Want a way to add context automatically to tickets that come? Did your question get cut off here? If you want to maybe expand on what your question is, I can. I'm not really sure what you mean by that. That's one piece of it right there. The other benefit of being able to parse the body of the email is just if you've got like knock alerts, you know, coming in from shadow protector or somebody like that who isn't hooking in directly through API. Sometimes the subject line is just completely generic. It's not helpful at all. Well, now you can go ahead and do an additional check later on in here that says, hey, if it's got XYZ in the body, use that to figure out what the company is. So in Azure Workflow Engine, you can do regex, which is search, grab, parse it out, store it in a variable, and then you can use that variable later. So I'll have to take a look at that piece here a little bit. Because you're on my side, at least everything got cut off. But yeah, if you want to add it as a CC to the ticket, yeah, you could do that. You can do that on Azure Workflow Engine just in general. So one of the nice pieces about this is that any action that you can do in Workflow Engine, you can do based on an email. So one of my favorite little things is that you could technically restart a server in RMM using an email. I would not recommend it, but you could do it because you could take an action in a different product. It doesn't have to be PSA. You could create an activity. You could create an opportunity or anything like that. So yeah, Alan, you can add contacts, as I mentioned, with an action, email loops. So you can put in checks into here to help verify that there are no looping aspects to it. We don't currently have a whole lot of that built into this, but that is something that we have on our radar. Adding other ticketing systems to contact. Sorry, I'm just reading Brad's. Send it back to the ticket and connect it. Yes. Yeah, Brad, that's what I'm saying is you could go ahead and grab that information. And once we add the message ID, it'll be even easier because now they don't even have to be replying to your email from your ticketing system. They could use their own. You know, if they're just sending it from themselves, we can use the in reply to message ID then, which was something that we had in the ASIO email connector specifically to solve this. It was something that I saw on the Enhancement Forums from like a decade ago. And somebody had a really great idea for how to solve it. So we did enable that. But obviously that email connector got killed at this point. But we'll be bringing that feature into here. The PSA email connector would not need to be turned off for this to work. In the idea that you could go ahead and as you're trying to test this out, you can run these side by side. I would not recommend running these side by side against the same mailbox, though. There's nothing that's going to stop you from doing it. But it would be a really bad idea because you could end up with duplicate emails. You could end up with or duplicate tickets. You could end up with kinds of weird weirdness. You know, it'd be a race condition. But as you're testing it out, like you don't have to shut off anything in PSA to be able to start using this. You could go ahead and just migrate over one at a time. We are not planning to directly migrate your email connectors. For one, we would have to have you authenticate and choose the mailboxes anyway. On top of that, frankly, it would take us a fair amount of time to go ahead and be able to migrate that over. Especially since things are just so much different in this system in general. So we'd have to try to translate all of those things. But thankfully, the template will handle most of the work for you unless you have some complicated parsing rules. Shannon, the plan is to replace email connector long term with this as a kind of smarter workflow or smarter email connector. I've been talking to the auto triage RPA team and integrating. The plan is to integrate that as well. So if you have that service, you could have it just effectively read the email instead of having to create the ticket first, then read the email. You could have it read the email out of the gate. You could even, you know, build in some stuff that it's like, oh, if it has this garbage in the email, I don't even want it to create a ticket. So, yeah, there's a lot of flexibility there. It's now possible to have client replies to an ASIO ticket email post back to the original ASIO ticket. Currently, ASIO tickets were a do not reply type notification from the connect device domain. Yeah, you can you can choose how you want to handle those. So as I mentioned, like right now, we have a lot of logic in here to verify, like, OK, is this ticket open? You know, find the ticket and then you can add the notes to the ticket down here. If you want to do something different with that or if you want to have it update the ticket, but not process those automatic notifications. So the customer doesn't get the automated email. You can you can disable that in this action as well. That's all in here. One of the known limitations. There's a few known limitations that I mentioned earlier. Just want to cover those. So, again, these are items we know we have to do that we are working on. They're just not ready yet. So we can't do inline images, attachments. And we don't currently convert like the HTML coding, you know, so the nice pretty stuff in the email. We don't convert that into the markdown. It's called language on unlike the note screen. And so you're not going to get kind of the pretty view of it when it comes in. I know that those items are for sure going to be stuff that people are going to. Well, I can't obviously move my primary email connector over today. I'm thinking people will use this primarily for like doc stuff to start off with and some testing as well. I've been working on workflows to send AZ alerts directly to teams for the workflow and teams groups are configured and prompts are being received during test. I think. So I'll take a look at that question after we're done here because it sounds like more of a general workflow issue. Identify if there's a loop. So you could add in some logic into this to go ahead and check to see if an existing ticket already matches this. You know, does it have the same body? You know, does this and subject and then just, you know, not process it. There are there are ways to do that. We don't currently have that built into this, but you could add those condition checks into here. If you want to do some of that yourself today. So Derek's question here right now, I have I forward emails to the PSA email integration. So all tickets get opened under myself and I have to reassign them. This new workflow could open the ticket under the person who emailed me instead of myself. Yes, you could. I am trying to figure out how in the message headers we get from Microsoft we identify who you're forwarding this from. It must exist somewhere, but I'm not sure where it is. I haven't been able to find it, but you could do a body check to look for, you know, who the sender was previously. And then you could go ahead and use that to identify the contact instead of yourself. Again, something we don't have built into this currently, but something that you could add. Another feature that we don't have in here today, at least not directly in this template, is email tags. So for those of you who use email tags on the PSA email connector, we don't have those built out in here. At some point, we may build out a bot that handles it. You can do them. So if there is one that's like, oh, I use this one all the time, you can do it. You can just do a parse of the body and build it out. And we'll probably include some documentation that just shows you an example of how you would do that. But given all of the condition checks that we would have to do, do all like 40 email tags or whatever we have in PSA, this would get really ugly really quickly. So we don't currently plan to build that out into here, but it is something that you are capable of doing. Another feature that we do not have in here that we are not currently planning to bring over is the ability to choose what inbox folder you want to monitor. So today in PSA, you can choose, you know, do you want it to be the inbox or do you want it to be a subfolder? In my testing, I found or research, I found that most people are using that because we have such little parsing options in our email connector. So this is kind of their way around it. They're using Outlook rules and things like that that move things around. So given that we have obviously those parsing rules built out into here, you know, you wouldn't have to do that potentially anymore. So as I mentioned, we do have, because you can do any actions, so like the new version of Outlook, we don't have that Outlook add-in anymore for creating activities from emails. You could go ahead and create an email rule in here that goes ahead and says, hey, if it comes from this person or if it includes this information, you know, create an activity. Don't even create a ticket. Just create an activity off of it. Or as I mentioned, if you're getting like spam, you could put something in that just says, I don't even want to create a ticket off of this. Just move it to red, move it to the process folder and move on with my day or move it to a spam folder or something along those lines to kind of help clean some of that up as well, if you'd like. Could we merge tickets for instances of backup failure and success? There's currently no action in Workflow Engine for merging tickets. But you could certainly reference them or use this email to identify them, but that would add directly into Workflow Engine. Merging tickets together in an automated way might be a little bit dangerous. ETA for this release. So a full release will be sometime in Q2 is kind of the expectation right now. I have those features that I mentioned that are missing that we're planning to have all those done. Okay, Darren, thank you very much. I'm just going to take over for one more minute now before we end. To just give people a preview of what's coming up. So we'll just take a screenshot. So we've got a question about recording this session is recorded. You should get an email actually automatically from GoToWebinar within a few weeks. So we've got a question about recording this session is recorded. You should get an email actually automatically from GoToWebinar within a few hours of the recording. But we also upload all of these to YouTube. And if you visit this QR code that's on the screen right now, that will take you there. Alternatively, just Google or rather go on to YouTube. Alternatively, just Google or rather go on to YouTube and search for the ConnectWise channel. And you'll see there on our channel, we have a product hours, product offers hours playlist where this will be added shortly. And all the previous sessions are there. And we also put out the webinars and events up on YouTube. And then coming up in February, we've got sessions from RMM. From backup and disaster recovery. And I'll be presenting at the end of the month about invoicing in PSA by ASIO. Now, you can find all of these on the ConnectWise University. If you log into the ConnectWise University of SSO, check the resources tab. It's at the top. And in that menu, there's a calendar. We put all of these under sign up links in the calendar, along with webinars, ask me anything sessions and similar. And if you want to go ahead and sign up right away for the next session, that's this RMM patching improvements on February 4th. Again, we've got a QR code on screen right now. So thanks to Darren for this demo today. Sorry for the slight delay in getting started today, but please do join us. We are presenting every Wednesday, always at 11 a.m. U.S. Eastern time. And yeah, that's it. Thank you very much everyone.
