Technical Desk - Sending Emails with Commence Connect

Create a view with the right format

1. In Commence, open up your contacts view (report style), then from the views menu select Views > Save View As...  

2. Call the the new view name "Contacts - For Email" or something which makes sense.

3. Set it to display on View Bar (none) and Views Menu (all) - this will make the view available from the Views menu but not clutter up your desktop icons.

4. Click on save button and the view will be saved under the new name.

5. The Email field needs visible in the view, so if it is not then make it visible by clicking anywhere in the new view window to select it, then go to Customise > Design View... Click on the Fields Tab, and then you will see two window lists. Find the email field from the list on the right hand side and click on the Append button. You will see the email field now appear in the left hand window list. Click on the OK button to save and you will now see the email field at the end of the view.

Creating a filter on the view

Normally you don't want to send email to every contact in your database, you usually only want the emails to go to a subset of your Contacts, say "All Product Managers in NSW" for example. So you now need to filter your new view accordingly. 

1. To filter a view: Right click on it and select Filter View. What you will be able to do will depend on what fields you have in your database. If we were doing the above example, we could set Filter 1 to be "Position is equal to Product Manager" and Filter 2 to be "State equals NSW".

2. Also there is no point sending emails to anyone who doesn't have an email address so you also need to filter out these people by setting Filter 3 to be "Except ticked and E-mail is blank"

3. On the Summary Tab, make sure there is an AND connection between Filter1, Filter2 and Filter3. Then click the OK button get back to the main Commence window. 

4. You now need to save all the changes you've made to the new view by going to Views > Save View. 

Setting up Commence Connect

If you have not used Commence Connect before, you will need to set up the options before you can send emails with it.

Note: When running Commence Connect you need to make sure that you only have one copy of Commence open (check the Taskmanager [Ctrl+Alt+Del] if you are not sure) and the correct database must be open. 

1. To start up Commence Connect go to Start > Programs > Commence RM > Connect For Email. There is also documentation available just under this, called the Connect For Email Guide, which will explain all the steps involved with setting up Connect and troubleshooting any problems you have.

2. When Connect opens, you will see the following screen appear:

3. You can set up the Connect settings from Tools > Options. Some of the options are:

• Libraries, are folders where you put all the documents and attachments that you wish to send. You have a public library which all Commence users can use and a private library just for your documents.

• Commence Data, where you tell Connect which Commence views to use. In View1, type in "Contacts - Marketing brochure NSW" for View Label, then select the Contacts category and the "Contacts - For Email" view (which we just created) as the View Name. The E-mail field name is obviously "E-mail". If you do not see the Email field it means that you did not add the Email field to the view above.

• Preferences, leave Show Views in Grid un-ticked and set send Single E-Mail Messages to use SMTP Email Server. Note Commence Connect only looks at this value if you are sending an email to a single person, otherwise it always uses the SMTP Email Server to send with. 

• E-mail Server, set the senders name and email address, and the SMTP Mail Server for Outgoing. If you are not sure what to use for the SMTP Mail Server, ask your administrator or look at the settings in Outlook. Typically if your mail server is called bob (IP address 127.0.0.1), and your company is xyz.com, then try setting SMTP Mail Server to:

bob.xyz.com  or 
127.0.0.1.xyz.com

Once you have set up all the Options, click on the OK button to save everything. 

Creating the Body of your Message

The E-Mail body is the visible part of the E-Mail. This is displayed as soon as the recipient opens the E-Mail. Note: Only TXT and/or HTML documents can be used for the body of your email message. 

1. Simply open a text or html editor and type in the body of your email message. 
   Note: only valid HTML files will work with Connect - be careful of some programs like Word which insert extra information into the html file. If you are having difficulties, you may need to inspect the HTML code to ensure it is valid. 

2. You can also embed data fields from Commence directly into the message body. To do this, type in the field code between "(%" and "%)". For example, if FirstName is a field that is in your Commence contacts, you might have the following in your HTML file:
   "Dear (%FirstName%), Please find enclosed brochures that you requested"

3. Save the document (as .txt or .html) and place it into the public and/or your private library. 

4. From the Tools menu select Refresh Library and you will see your new email message body appear under the HTML or Text icons in the local/shared library window.

Attachments

In general, the documents you select from your library will appear as attachments to the E-mail message. Attached files may be saved to disk by the recipient or opened for viewing. Note that some recipients may not be able to process certain types of attachments depending on their E-Mail program’s level of security. The types of documents you can send as attachments are:

• Plain Text - use Windows Notepad to generate ASCII text documents

• RTF - use Microsoft Word to generate Rich Text Format documents

• DOC - use Microsoft Word to generate formatted documents

• HTML - use Microsoft FrontPage to create Hypertext Markup Language documents.

• PDF - use Adobe Acrobat Writer to save documents in PDF format. Additionally, plug-ins may be available for Microsoft Word and other applications to save other document types in PDF format

To add a new document to the library 

1. Simply copy it into the public and/or your private library. 

2. From the Tools menu select Refresh Library and you will see your new document appear under the icons in the local/shared library window.

 Opening your list of Contacts in Connect

The next step is to select contacts to receive the mailing. The way to do this is to push the first Contact button in Connect that has been linked to a Commence view for your mailing. 

We already set up a linked view to the first contact button when we did the following:

In Tools>Options on the Commence Data tab, this is where you tell Connect which Commence views to use. In View1, type in "Contacts - Marketing brochure NSW" for View Label, then select the Contacts category and the "Contacts - For Email" view (which we just created) as the View Name. The E-mail field name is obviously "E-mail". If you do not see the Email field it means that you did not add the Email field to the view above.

When you click on the Contact button, you should see the following screen:

You can also choose to only send emails to some of the people in the list or all. You do this by either ticking the ones you want to send it to, or more often by going to Views > Select All, and the de-selecting the ones which you don't want to include in the mailing. You can also highlight the row and press the Spacebar on your keyboard. 

Selecting Attachments

To send one or more documents with the emails, simply place a tick next to the ones you want to be sent. You will find the documents which are available, under the icons on the left hand window.

Sending the Emails

Once you have chosen all the documents needed for this mailing and selected either all contacts or specific contacts for your mailing list, you are ready to proceed to the next step to send the E-Mail.

To E-Mail the selected documents to the contacts in your list:

1. Verify that you have selected at least one document, and at least one contact. 

2. Select File > Send E-Mail or click the Send E-Mail button on the toolbar. The Sending E-Mail... dialog will appear. 

3. First enter the E-Mail Subject. You may type any brief message or a description of the documents attached.

4. Next, select a document for the E-Mail Message Body. Only TXT and/or HTML documents are available for use in the message body. 

5. If applicable, check the box next to each document that is a Mail Merge Candidates. This option should only be selected if you have Commence field codes in your message body that must be merged with.

6. Click OK to begin sending e-mail to the mailing list. A log window will appear so you can confirm the status of each email as it is being sent.

7. When the send is complete, click OK to close the log window. The information for this mailing is stored to a temporary file that can be reviewed until the next time you send an E-mail from Connect. Then the log is updated with information from the current mailing.