Supporting Email Updates with Email Statusing Service

Projects may require that P6 users temporarily work in remote locations without access to the private network where the P6 server resides. Diverse project teams may also exist with some members updating their activities using P6, and others using email.

In order to support the updating of assignment status by email, you will need to verify the following requirements have been met.

To support email updates for your team at your organization:

Verify with your administrator that support for email activity updates has been deployed with your P6 application server.
Verify that the following prerequisites have been fulfilled in P6:
1. You have a valid user account in P6.
  Note: With a P6 user account, you can be assigned to activities as a resource assignment if your user account is associated with a labor resource, assigned to an activity as an activity owner, or assigned a Team Member work distribution filter.
2. Your user account is configured with at least one module access option.
3. Your user account must specify your own unique email address.
4. You have one or more activity assignments for at least one active project. The email will show activities that have not yet started, active activities in progress, and activities you completed in the last 180 days.
  Note: OBS access to a project is not required in order for you to make status updates on your assigned activities unless you are assigned a Team Member work distribution filter.
Download and install any email client application or browser to access web mail.
Plan your activity status by email process with your team and manager. For example, consider details such as the timing of updates by email versus updates made in P6, P6 mobile, or other P6 Team Member interfaces to avoid conflicts.

Known Issues

Yahoo and Hotmail web clients are not supported. If your email address is assigned to one of these accounts, access your account within an SMTP email client.
When project managers use the Notify email request to send a list of activities to team members, the following time frame options are not supported:
- Active Today, Due Today, or Completed Today
- Active Tomorrow, Due Tomorrow, or Starting Tomorrow
- Completed Yesterday
Instead, you can use:
- Active in next 1 day, Due, or Completed in last 1 day
- Active in next 2 days or Due in next 2 days
- Completed in last 1 day

Error Messages

You may receive error messages when updating activities if your email application is set to return email messages in HTML format.

One of the following situations will occur:

An email will be returned with the message "Date or unit format specified was invalid or missing.".
If there is an error in the Time Spent, Time Left, or Remaining Duration fields, an email will be returned with a message that the updated value is incorrect because only part of the updated value was parsed by the Email Statusing Service.

The following methods can be used to avoid this issue:

When entering activity updates, delete the original value in its entirety before entering an updated value.
Set the email application to reply to messages in text format.
Click the Update this activity link to update activities individually.

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