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About Authenticating the Email Sender's Email Address in Siebel Email Response

This chapter details how a sender's email address is authenticated by Siebel Email Response. It also provides details on how the eMail Response - Process Service Request workflow can be customized. The eMail Response - Process Service Request workflow process authenticates inbound email sender addresses during the Lookup Sender business service step. Figure 11 outlines this workflow process.

Figure 11.  eMail Response - Process Service Request

NOTE:  Many customers can deploy Siebel Email Response without advanced customizing. For customers with more complex needs, this chapter contains information that can be used to customize eMail Response - Process Service Request workflows. Before you use the advanced setup procedures in this chapter, follow all instructions in Planning a Siebel Email Response Deployment and Completing Basic Setup Tasks.

Understanding the Lookup Sender Business Service

The high-level logic of this step is to use the inbound email sender's email address to search the list of contact records in the Siebel database for a matching email address. When the match is found, the step returns the row ID of the contact and the row ID of the contact's primary account and continues processing the request. These values are used in the following ways:

• When the Submit and Update workflow subprocesses are run, the row ID values are used to set values for the service request and activity records.
• When the Status subprocess is run, the row ID values are used to find the service request record.
• If no match is found, the workflow branches to an error condition and sends the inbound email sender a notification that authentication failed.

The Lookup Sender Business Service step uses the Inbound Email Siebel Operation business service FindRecord method to query a specific business object and business component within Siebel. The step uses developer-defined input arguments to specify the business object, business component, the field, the value to search the field with, and finally a field that is to provide the return value. The output argument of the step maps a process property from the workflow process to the value field returned by the query.

In the standard workflow process, the Lookup Sender Business Service step goes to the Mail Agent Contact business component in the Mail Agent Activity business object. In the Mail Agent Contact business component, it takes the value from the Email Address field and compares it to the MsgSenderAddress process property. When a matching contact record is found, it returns the Account ID field value and ID field value from that record. In some cases, users may need to modify the authentication logic so that the processing is based on a different business component, a different field, and so on. The following are two examples of how to accomplish this task.

CAUTION:  Changes to one step in a workflow process may affect other steps later in the process. Therefore, be careful when customizing any workflow and test all customized workflow processes thoroughly before implementing them in a Production environment.