ServiceDesk 4.8.29 Update 06/27/17

We credit Tony Lott, of Appliance Express in Texas, for this one.  

He emailed me, expressing how much today's consumers are learning to prefer electronic communication over phone calls.  Of course, his office does too, because emails and text messages are much more efficient and less taxing of limited personnel resources. 

Rossware systems already offer, of course, a large number of mechanisms that are designed to accomplish defined kinds of communication electronically (e.g., initial requests to schedule, requests to re-schedule after parts arrive, confirming appointments, etc.). However, there will always be a limit in the variety of defined communication types that we can reasonably design for.  Tony's office found itself in a situation where they wanted to define a number of their own communication context types, so they created (and have been using) "templates" for those.

Tony's suggestion was simple.  Why not create a provision in ServiceDesk where it can "call out" to such templates, fill in the spaces appropriately, and directly send a perfect email or text-message, as user-selected for the context. 

So, that's what we now offer.

Full instructions are in this document. 

 Tony made the kind suggestion that building this feature might be a revenue enhancement for Rossware, via added email and SMS charges.  It raises a matter I wish to clarify:

There is no fee from Rossware -- whatsoever -- as connected with sending emails.  There is a fee for RoboCalls and there is a fee for SMS messages.  I would like to assure everyone understands the difference. 

In regard to any of these methods, ServiceDesk may be thought of as the physical telephone in the old-fashioned AT&T voice-communication network.  Since you purchased ServiceDesk and via support pay for its updates, your "telephone handset" is covered by that, and there cannot properly be any separate and/or additional charge in its connection. 

Thus, when you send an email (and even when you use ServiceDesk to do it), Rossware is not equivalent to the old AT&T.  We are not the "carrier" that transmits your email to its recipient.  We only provided the telephone handset (which you've already otherwise paid for), and nothing more. 

When you use ServiceDesk to request a RoboCall or SMS message, by contrast, Rossware is in that context equivalent to the old AT&T -- in that we provide, in addition to the telephone handset itself, actual means of communication.  It's added mechanisms we provide, in other words, that are the "carrier" in this context.  We actually buy these mechanisms at wholesale and resell to you at retail.  That's why there is a fee, and it's why it makes sense for us to charge separately in this context, but positively would be wrong and unfair for us to charge for sending emails.  Again, you already bought the handset, and it is not Rossware-provided instrumentalities that transmit your emails across the internet.