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Administering Email Manager and Page Manager

This topic describes how to administer the email manager and page manager components. It includes the following topics:

• Setting Up the Siebel Server for Email Manager
• Setting Up the Communications Profile to Send Email Through Workflow
• Starting Email Manager
• Setting Up the Siebel Server for Page Manager
• Parameters for the Page Manager Component
• Troubleshooting Email Manager and Page Manager

Setting Up the Siebel Server for Email Manager

Some workflow policy actions allow you to send email messages to specific individuals. Considerations to weigh include:

• To send email using workflow policies and an SMTP/POP3-compliant mail system, both must be working properly on your network.
• The Email Manager component of the Siebel server must be running. This is part of the Communications Management component group, which must be configured.
• Email Manager uses profiles set up in Communications Manager. The Communications Outbound Manager does verification of the profile. You then must make sure this profile is configured correctly to log into the SMTP/POP3-compliant mail system.
• You must also set the Mail Profile parameter to the name of the communication profile you need to use for sending the email.

Date Format in an Email Message

A workflow policy program is executed by the Siebel server, which connects to Oracle through ODBC. As part of this process, the required data is retrieved from the database through this connection. The format of a date in an email message is the format returned from the ODBC driver, which might be different to that used by Oracle.

Setting Up the Communications Profile to Send Email Through Workflow

Sending email through Workflow involves creating a communications profile.

NOTE:  To create a new communications profile, CompGrp CommMgmt must be configured. Make sure it is configured before beginning the following procedure. For more information, see Siebel Communications Server Administration Guide.

To create a Communications Profile

1. In the Siebel client, navigate to Administration-Communications > Communications Drivers and Profiles.
2. In the Communications Drivers list applet, query the Name field for the Internet SMTP/POP3 Server communications driver.
3. Click the Profiles view tab.
4. Create a new profile called [Profile Name].
5. In the Profile Parameters Overrides applet, create records for parameters using values described in the following table:

   Parameter	Usage
   From Address	Define the sender's email address for outbound communications.
   POP3 Account Name	Define the account name for the POP3 mailbox from which to retrieve inbound communications.
   POP3 Account Password	Define the password for the POP3 mailbox account.
   POP3 Server	Define the host name or IP address of the machine on which the Internet POP3 server is running, as appropriate for your network configuration.
   SMTP Server	Define the host name or IP address of the machine on which the Internet SMTP server is running, as appropriate for your network configuration.

   For details on these parameters, see Siebel Communications Server Administration Guide.

After creating your communications profile, you must create the component definition of Email Manager. The Email Manager component executes email actions once the conditions of a Workflow policy are met.

Starting Email Manager

You can start Email Manager from the command line, or from the Email Manager Component view.

To start email manager from the command line

To start the Email Manager task with the [Profile Name] profile, in the server manager command line, use the following command to start a task for Email Manager:

start task for comp MailMgr with MailProfile=<Profile Name>

To start email manager from the server administration view

1. Navigate to Administration-Server Configuration > Servers > Components.
2. In the Components list, find the Email Manager component.
3. In the Component Parameters list, set Mail Profile = Test.
4. To automatically start up a task for Email Manager whenever the component is restarted or the Siebel Server services are restarted, set the component parameter Default Tasks = 1.

How Outbound Communications Manager Sends Email

The Outbound Communications Manager sends email messages according to the following process:

1. When the workflow policy is violated, workflow monitor agent inserts a record into the S_APSRVR_REQ table for workflow actions that invokes the Send Email workflow policy programs.
2. Email Manager picks up records from the S_APSRVR_REQ table, setting their status from QUEUED to ACTIVE then to SUCCEEDED during the course of the execution.
3. Outbound Communications Manager is invoked to log onto the [Profile Name] profile.
4. Outbound Communications Manager sends emails to recipients using the Send Message method of the Outbound Communications Manager business service.

About the Mail Profile Parameter

The Mail Profile parameter specifies the mail profile to use and is defined in Control Panel. The parameter establishes the connection between the application and the email system. If you do not specify a profile here, the default profile is used. The names must match exactly.

Setting Up the Siebel Server for Page Manager

Some workflow policy actions allow you to send page messages to specific individuals. The Page Manager component of the Siebel server must be running for you to send a page. Some actions can page specific individuals with alphanumeric or numeric pagers. Prerequisites to send a page using a workflow policy include:

• The server running the Page Manager component has access to a local or network modem.
• The Page Manager component of the Siebel server is running. Several parameters, similar to dial-up networking set up in Windows, must be set prior to running the Page Manager component.
• Enter the appropriate telephone numbers for paging in the Employee view. These are the numbers used by Workflow.
• Change the regional configuration to avoid inputting the country code prior to the telephone number. This can cause errors.
• Change the PAGE_TYPE list of values parameters to make the page manager accept an alphanumeric send. This means the language and the value displayed.

NOTE:  Alphanumeric paging is more reliable than numeric paging because the pager messages are transmitted by the computer at the pager companies. This is not true for numeric paging, where pager messages are sent by emulating key presses on a phone. Failures in sending numeric pager messages are very difficult to detect.

The Page Manager component uses the industry standard protocol Telocator Alphanumeric Protocol (TAP) for alphanumeric paging. Check with your pager company for the phone number to send your alphanumeric paging.

Several parameters affect how the Page Manager component interacts with the modem. You can change these parameters in the Server Administration screen. The available parameters are listed. The modem parameters are the defaults for Hayes-compatible modems. Make sure the settings are compatible with your modem.

To run the Page Manager component

1. In the Siebel client, navigate to Administration-Server Management > Jobs.
2. In the Jobs list, click New.
3. From the Component/Job drop-down list, choose the Page Manager component.
4. In the Job Parameters list, click New.
5. Click Parameters in the Server Tasks applet and enter your parameters.

   For a list of parameters, see Table 71.

Parameters for the Page Manager Component

The most important parameters are Modem Port, Dial Prefix, Long Distance Prefix, and Local Area Code. Change the values for these parameters to match your system. Table 71 describes default values used if you do not specify a parameter.

Troubleshooting Email Manager and Page Manager

Email Manager stops processing when it is unable to log on to the mail server (SMTP/POP3-compliant server and logs an error message in the trace files.

Page Manager stops processing if the modem is not available. The requests continue to accumulate in the Requests table. After you fix the processing problems, you must restart the servers. The servers continue processing from the point where they were interrupted.

If Email Manager is able to log on but has a problem sending a particular email, it logs an error message and continues on to the next request. If Page Manager is able to interface with the modem but has a problem with a given page send, it logs an error and moves on to the next request.

When workflow policies executes email and paging actions, it inserts email requests and paging requests into the database. These requests are inserted as records in the S_APSRVR_REQ table, which are then processed by Email Manager and Page Manager.

New requests have a status of QUEUED. After a request is picked up by Email Manager or Page Manager, but before it is processed, it has a status of ACTIVE. After a request is processed, the request's status becomes SUCCEEDED if the processing is successful, or FAILED if an error occurs.

To generate sending emails, Siebel Server uses the UNIX Mail command.

Use the following procedure to make sure your server platform can run the command to a valid recipient and to make sure email was successfully sent.

To make sure the server platform can run the command to a valid recipient

1. From the UNIX command prompt, type:

   >mail recipient email address

   Where recipient email address is a valid address.

2. Type a message ending with a period on the last line to indicate the end of the message.
3. Press enter.
4. If email written to S_APSRVR_REQ is not sent, even though the Email Manager trace file displays status SUCCEEDED, make sure the following Outlook settings on the server are set:
   • Send messages immediately
   • Check for new messages every [x] minutes

     Both of these options must be configured in Outlook for email messages to be sent successfully.