ID's Management Automate + Lists

[zeperna]

My post is being marked as SPAM, so I sent my problem in the image.

[SamLed]

Hi,

If I well understood your need, you want to identify emails based on an ID, ID you took from SharePoint. Simplify your design, this identification is useless, the only ID that should be present is the item's one, use email subject to store that information. If you need to treat many emails concerning same item, no need suffix, just respect chronology to determine their order.

For example, you receive a mail from which you create item, from now, any mails sent following status changes, give them a subject like "[ID1001] subject". 

In you flow triggered by mail reception you get item ID from subject and do what you have to do to that item.

______________________________________________________________

If I have answered your question, please Accept the post as solution.
If you like my response, please Thumbs Up.

[zeperna]

Some relevant points:

1. I can't control the subject that a person puts.

2. It can replicate the same email more than twice, with updates.
3. I can have the same subject, for different ID's. That is, I have the same subjects for different requests.

With these relevant points, can you help me with a solution?

[SamLed · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Ok, you can't rely on how users send the information if you need to automate updates. You have to make a rule. If user wants his changes taken into account, he must follow a procedure else that will be a nightmare near impossible to automate. For same reason, you can't have same subject for different items.

You'll tell me that ID is in the mail body, but again, it is more complex to extract that data from body with all other data around than from subject.

So, when you receive the first mail, you create an item, no need to have information to identify that item in subject at this stage as you create it, then you send a mail back with the item ID and title as subject. From now, if user want updating item, he has to reply to that last email or send an email with the [ID:XXXX] part in subject.

Believe me, I've been advising big companies for over 25 years now, such subject comes always on the table, IT doesn't make miracle and sparing the users whatever the cost is not always the solution. Everyone has to go a little way to drive project to success. In other words, if IT does the heavy lifting, the users must also contribute their stone to the building, if only by respecting a simple rule.

Can you issue such rule to make your project a success ?  

[Edit] About ID, no need to use the item ID if it looks too technical for users. But at least you need an unique identifier. You can create a column accepting unique value in which you'll set a custom ID everybody can understand, easier for them to reference it in mail subject than a number.

______________________________________________________________

If I have answered your question, please Accept the post as solution.
If you like my response, please Thumbs Up.

[wskinnermctc · Accepted solution]

@zeperna It seems like you are trying to create some sort of ticket type system?

You will have to create some method of control to keep these organized. It would be impossible to get any email and assign it to the correct Incident/Request or whatever without some sort of constant.

Like @SamLed said, you can receive an email and automatically reply with another email that provides a Task# or RequestID in the subject and say "Thank you we have received your email. This has been assigned Task#ID:'AB2345'. Please use this message to reply or include in the subject."

We use Jira which is a paid software for ticketing system, and even it requires me to have ticket request number in the subject for any replies.

The alternative is a more comprehensive control that would be more like a portal in a PowerApp where people go in and initiate requests or look up previous requests. But that would be very complex (unless you're an expert in building PowerApps). But even then, if there was some kind of email notifications coming from a PowerApp, it would require a constant like a Ticket# to reference any responses.

I guess if you want to manually deal with them you could. That would require some extra columns on the SharePoint list where you have like ParentID 'AB1001' and then ChildID 'AB1001.1' for any following emails. But you would literally have to manually look at the new item, determine if it corresponds to a previous item, update the ParentID which would then trigger a flow that would go through the list, get all of the items with ParentID 'AB1001' count them or get the last 'AB1001.4' and then update the ChildID with 'AB1001.5' via the flow.

At that point you might as well manually filter the list and type in both the ParentID and ChildID which isn't very efficient.

[zeperna]

Yes, it would be a "ticket system". @wskinnermctc 

Thanks for the answers, they certainly gave me a light. I will rethink the way it is done, the tips will certainly be used.