Filter for unassigned Cases

Hi Kristjan Geir Mathiesen,

this might also interest Zac Sprackett as he answeared to this thread some days ago: "Unexpected values found in emails" when upgrading to 8.0 

FYI: Kristján and I discussed this topic separately in Skype and I'm aware the original quetion is about unassigned cases but the issue we have on this is the same.

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In my experience, setting up several queues based on multiple imports from "role based" email inboxes might be tricky and as far as I know can't be done by out of the box abilities.

Let's say we have an international support team with own local email adresses and also a sales department per subsidary. Here we need to set up multiple inbound email records.

The issues we are facing here is the team assignment. If we set up a team per job, the case AND attached email got only those teams set, which means everyone who is not be supposed to be in the assignment group will never see the case or its attached email.

Due to advanced workflows criteria does not have access to teams of a current record or the email module, we can't create workarounds with adv. workflows.

For now the only solution is a logic hook which for sure does the trick but is not a good solution for me as a CRM consultant. 

I would like to see at least the following enhancements which can be build in easily I think:

1. Adding the possibility on "Inbound email" to add a distribution team additionaly to the a teamset for visibility

2. Adding the possibility on "Inbound email" to set a value to the standard "source" dropdown list for flagging the source the case comes from. Not a beautifuly solution but it will work.

3. *Bling bling* solution: have access to all fields incl. custom fields to set on automatic case creation per "inbound email" configuration.

This might be a quick win and would solve alot until a new cases solution will be released in later versions.

Bests

Björn Canales Pfisterer

Technical Support Manager

provalida GmbH

Thanks Björn Canales Pfisterer for this.

Yes, it would be awesome to be able to tag the Cases in the Inbound Email config - even if it was just a Tag. That would make it possible to identify which Cases came from which Inbound Email handler. Definitely an enhancement request Or allow the advanced workflow to use Teams on the record for criteria

Thanks,

KGM

Anyone else have an idea?

Thanks,

KGM

Hi Kristjan Geir Mathiesen,

The goal as I understand it (please correct me if I have misunderstood):

• Two Inbound Email group accounts create Cases for two distinct groups: sales and techSupport
• The created case will round-robin to all members of the specified team, but self-service is desired.
• sales and techSupport Regular-type users can only see records assigned to a team they are on, so they won't have access to cases or emails not in round-robin assignment to them (distribution vs visibility).
• Advanced Workflow cannot access the Emails module to evaluate fields and make field changes.
• Logic hooks are not the desired solution for some consultants and clients.

I agree that the above goal is not 100% achievable using only features available in the application. A logic hook is needed for at least one simple part of this, as described below.

My brainstorm idea:

1. Create/specify a user to own all new cases for each team. Cases owned by this user are considered unassigned.
2. Create a team for only this one user
3. In the Inbound Email Group Account settings, set this team to the "Assign To Teams" so all cases go to this user.
4. Create an Advanced Workflow Process Definition that appends the appropriate team(s) to the new case so now those other Regular Users can search for and see the cases.
5. (This is the one part the application features cannot currently do) A logic hook fires for the case after step 4, updating the related email's team set to match the Case so now those other Regular Users can see the email(s).
6. Implement the Cases filter on Assigned To equals the user in step 1 so the team can find and self-service assign the cases.

I appreciate that this does not satisfy all of the parameters of the goal as it does use a logic hook, but I hope it is helpful to the discussion.

Hey Patrick McQueen

Yes, pretty much like you said except in this particular use case, the sales and techSupport have the same visibility (teams). The core of this challenge is: identify unassigned cases that come from the sales mail handler (even if standard Sugar would offer "is empty" option for the "Assignee" field in the filter, it still would not cut it since we don´t know from which mail handler the Case comes from). Hope I am making myself understandable

I´m having trouble with the gmail account at the moment but it seem´s that with Cases are not being assigned to my Group user, that is the only one in the Team that gets assigned via Round Robin :/

Yes, I´m working on a after_save Logic Hook that populates a filed that I can then show in the search to filter on.

Thanks,

KGM

Our Case Creation Email Handler assigns cases to a New Case Team of which there are no members (this gets around the Round Robin/Least Busy limitation). In our situation we don't need a Sales and a Service team so we don't use multiple Case Creation Email Handlers but our solution would still work if that was the case - we would just have multiple empty teams (New Sales Case Team, New Service case Team etc).

All new Cases get a status of New automatically.

Because only Administrators would be able to see those Cases and linked emails, we have a Legacy Workflow (because Advanced can't do this) that changes the Team to the "real" team - in our case we use Global, but it could be whatever valid team is needed (e.g. Sales Team, Service Team etc). That would require multiple Legacy Workflows - one for each New Case Team.

We now can run reports or do list enquiries on Cases with a Status of New for the Service Team (or Sales team etc to determine unassigned cases.) When we assign a Case to a specified user, we change the status to Assigned, but we could have Legacy workflow do that if we wanted.

I hope this is of help.

I agree that there are two functional problems that cause all of us to have to find workarounds:

1. The Least Busy/ Round Robin assignment is not necessarily suitable for many of us.

2. Advanced Workflow is not where we need it to be to handle things ike this and so we have to fall back to Legacy Workflow

Hopefully SugarCRM press ahead with a significantly improved Customer Self Service Portal as we really want to move around from email based Case creation but that is not easy to do with the functional limitations of the current portal. 

Regards

Greg Barrass

Hi Kristjan Geir Mathiesen,

I have been spinning this is my mind for a bit and I think you can get to it with calculated fields. 

1. In Studio > Cases module create two calculated text fields:

   - related_email_c calculated with formula: related($emails,"to_addrs_names")

   - is_assigned_c calculated with formula: greaterThan(strlen(toString(related($assigned_user_link,"last_name"))),0)

   ( or any other required field in users that can be used to check if a user exists)

2. Add the two text fields to Studio > Cases > Layouts > Search ( And to recordview to test )

3. Either import a new email to create a case, or resave an existing case to confirm the values populate to the two fields

4. In Cases listview create two new filters: 

   - related_email_c - exactly matches: <sales emailaddress> 

   - is_assigned_c -exactly matches: false

In my tests this allowed to show any cases created from email to a certain account with no assigned user. 

Would that work for you?

Thanks,

Dennis

// Edit: would be more elegant to use a dropdown for the is_assigned_c field so you can select false as a filter

Hi Dennis,

good thinking!

Am I right that "to_addrs_names" pointing to the 'to_addrs" field in the email_text table? On the imported email there can be more than one email address , also saved in different formats like:

support@mydomain.de, Mr Boss <mrboss@mydomain.de>

or

Support <support@mydomain.de>, mrboss@mydomain.de

So the filter should at least use another operator than "starts with" or "exactly matches" but this also needs a custom operator on text fields, right? My concern is that some cases will never be touched due to this.

//Edit: and when we implement a custom operator we should do this for the assigned user ^^

Bests

Björn Canales Pfisterer

Technical Support Manager

provalida GmbH

That is a valid point Björn Canales Pfisterer, to cover this usecase the following approach would work: 

For related_email_c instead of getting the related address, check if it contains a relevant address with the following formula ( obviously can be extended to check against more addresses or what to do when both addresses are in the To (or CC) Recipients: 

ifElse(contains(related($emails,"to_addrs_names"),"sales@example.com"),"Sales","Support")

With that when the To-Field contains the Sales address the field shows "Sales". Again add this and the is_assigned_c field to the search Layouts in studio. Then you can add a listview filter to for all Cases where related emails contain the Sales address and are unassigned.

Awesome Dennis Wangerin !

Thank you for that! Sometimes I need to remind myself more often about what is possible with Sugarlogic

Have a nice weekend!

Bests

Björn