Features

OpsMailmanager makes effective email management easy for users, who will benefit from:

• Convenience and speed: simply drag and drop emails directly into the Alfresco repository for automatic filing
• Easy-to-use interaction via familiar user tools - no need to learn how to use a new system - instead:
  • Find and view documents and emails from your email client or file system view
  • Work entirely in office tools, using a pop-up window to search and manage documents and emails; or
  • View document and email content all within the Alfresco ECM
• Find information in a single search, regardless of the document format
• Automatically store and share important outgoing emails using user-configured rules

Benefits

OpsMailmanager for Alfresco enables your organisation to:

• Store all your information safely and securely in one central repository, making all information available to everyone (permissions permitting) as well as reducing the total storage requirement by removing duplicates
• Increase productivity - save all the time lost looking for information currently buried across multiple file systems and in email
• Keep key information readily available within the company when staff members leave
• Facilitate and improve knowledge sharing and collaboration across a team or project
• Power search across documents, emails and their attachments
• Get a cross-team or cross-project view of all communications internally and with customers or other external parties
• Create a secure, auditable central store of information and correspondence so you can easily demonstrate compliance with regulatory requirements and respond to requests for information

Product Capabilities

Standards Compliance - OpsMailmanager stores email using the open Internet standard MIME format, and uses the IMAP (internet message access protocol) standard for managing the transfer of email messages.

This enables OpsMailmanager to work with all leading email clients, including:

• Outlook
• Lotus Notes
• Novell GroupWise
• Thunderbird

As well as any other email client that supports the IMAP standard.

Auto-indexing - metadata embedded in the email message is automatically extracted, and the contents of the email and any attachments are automatically indexed by the Alfresco repository, enabling email content to be searched alongside other content.

Secure - OpsMailmanager respects permissions across the Alfresco repository so all information, regardless of format or type, is only available to those authorised to view it.

Scalable - built to professional standards and proven to store, index and search over 5,000 emails per folder.

Integration with Alfresco

OpsMailmanager is available as an Alfresco Module Package (AMP), which is fully portable, and can be extracted for automatic or custom installation into Alfresco.

It can support all versions of Alfresco from version 2.1 onwards, and uses standard ways of interacting with the repository - for example emails are an aspect and can be applied independently of document type.

Support

Opsera's OpsMailmanger Enterprise Support subscription provides:

• Opsera OpsMailmanager Enterprise software and source code
• Software tested for quality, performance, stability and security
• Direct access to the Opsera Issue Tracking System (OITS)
• Issue escalation and resolution with a Service Level Agreement offering guaranteed response times
• Opsera Support mailing lists and wiki
• Access to Opsera product engineers for configuration and performance tuning advice
• Free access to maintenance releases, upgrades and patches
• Access to technical and user documentation

Enterprise Support Service Level Agreement

A subscription agreement allows for up to two designated customer technical contacts that will develop, maintain or support the customer's installation. The customer may modify its designated technical support contacts at any time. These technical support contacts will be the only interface to the OpsMailManager support team.

First line support is typically provided by the customer support team. Second line support is offered by Opsera or through our certified partner network. Third line support is provided by Opsera's dedicated support and engineering personnel.

Enterprise support is available in the core service hours of 0900-1700 Monday to Friday excluding Bank Holidays in either UK time zone or the local time zone of our certified support partners. The service level agreement provided is summarised in the table below:

OITS - Opsera Issue Tracking System

Severity Level

The severity level allocated to an incident is intended to reflect the level of disruption to the customer's business. Opsera's standard severity level definitions are:-

Maintenance Releases and Upgrades

During the Support Services term, Opsera will make maintenance releases and upgrades available to customers. If a question arises as to whether a product offering is an upgrade or a new product or feature, Opsera's opinion will prevail, provided that Opsera treats the product offering as a new product or feature for its customers generally.

As part of the conditions of providing support, customers will be obliged to promptly install all maintenance releases and upgrades to maintain their software at the then current level and undertake any other reasonable requests from Opsera to maintain their system, communication lines, hardware and software.

Consulting

Opsera provides a full range of consulting services to support our customers and partners in the evaluation, selection, implementation and support of information management solutions. We can help you to evaluate the need for better information management, quantify the benefits and recommend the right technical approach.

With OpsMailmanager and Alfresco we provide a complete implementation programme that includes:

• Business requirements analysis and process change
• Project management
• Overall technical architecture design
• Product installation and configuration
• Best practice and tuning guidance
• Tailoring and bespoke development (if required)
• Infrastructure design and implementation
• Testing, training and handover of system

The services you may need will vary depending on your internal knowledge and technical capability. Opsera are happy to work with your internal team providing support and guidance to them or we can take full responsibility for the entire implementation and role-out - whatever fits your needs.

Our consulting services are billable by the hour and are normally charged separate from the subscription agreement.

Training

Opsera provides user, developer and administrator training courses either at our offices or at your location.

• System Administration & Configuration (2 days)

This is an introductory course for all OpsMailmanager customers, partners and developers. It introduces the functionality, how to set-up and configure the product, how to configure users email clients and how to manage and administer the system and users. It is a pre-requisite course for the OpsMailmanager for Developers course.

• OpsMailmanager for Developers (3 days)

This is a detailed technical training course designed for new developers who are commencing an implementation of OpsMailmanager or need to develop additional functionality specific to their requirements.

Please contact opsmailmanager@opsera.com for more details and dates for forthcoming courses.

Licensing and Pricing Terms

OpsMailmanager is provided under a commercial End User Licence Agreement and subject to the purchase of annual support subscription either directly from Opsera or through one of our certified partners. The source code is provided to customers with a support subscription.

OpsMailmanager is provided in Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg through our co-development partner and reseller, Xenit. If you're in the UK or any region outside the Benelux countries, please contact us directly on opsmailmanager@opsera.com

FAQs

General

1. Does OpsMailmanager comply with standards, such as IMAP?

   IMAP, or Internet Message Access Protocol, is one of the protocols that you can use to talk to an email server (another commonly used protocol is POP). The benefit with IMAP is that messages stay on the server until you tell it to delete them; if you use POP, the server deletes a message as soon as you have retrieved it with your email client.

   OpsMailmanager enables Alfresco to work as an email server. So you can upload and download messages from your computer into the Alfresco repository, using a standard email client such as MS Outlook. When the messages are stored in the Alfresco content management system they can be searched and shared, with other people working on the same project for example. The IMAP protocol creates a constant connection between mail clients (desktop and/or mobile) and OpsMailmanager.

   OpsMailmanager uses the Apache James IMAP protocol implementation.

2. Can the properties and types of my document model also be used for emails?

   Yes, OpsMailmanager will let you use your domain document model for emails as well. It supports a dynamic form feature in Outlook that will enable you to attach domain-specific types, aspects and properties to an email when it is added to an OpsMailmanager folder.

   The dynamic form reads your document model and presents the user with a form based on the model definitions. So for example, if an email is related to an order from a specific customer, and you have defined the type order in your document model, you could assign the type order to an email and set the customer id for the order when the email is added to an IMAP folder.

   You could even integrate the dynamic form with your CRM system and get the customer id dynamically via that system.

3. There is already an Email project under Alfresco Forge, can't we just use it instead?

   Project URL: http://forge.alfresco.com/projects/email/

   The Inovox email solution only supports a very small amount of the functionality that OpsMailmanager delivers. Specifically it will allow a user to store RFC-822 compliant mails in the repository (Outlook does not export into this format), but does not provide an 'Outlook view' of the repository, as OpsMailmanager does. Basically what it allows you to do is:

   • Upload an email via the Alfresco Web Client or CIFS interface and assign it type RFC 822 email
   • Search for text contained in emails.

   What it does NOT do, but that is supported in OpsMailmanager, is:

   • Allow you to view the Alfresco folder hierarchy from Outlook, Thunderbird, Lotus Notes or other email clients that support IMAP
   • Allow you to integrate with an enterprise content management document hierarchy, which is usually defined with new content types extending Alfresco's cm:content. For example, cm:content <-- mycompany:document <-- mycompany:supplier.
     • Usually there will be an issue when you start integrating the email type and the other domain specific types. For example if you are storing an email into the Alfresco repository which is supplier related. And you know that it should then extend the mycompany:supplier document type and also the rfc822 document type. So the question is do you let the mycompany:document extend the rfc822 document type? Also, when you upload a supplier word doc you want it to be of the type mycompany:supplier but it is not an email, so some problems will emerge here that might be difficult to solve.
     • In OpsMailmanager the email is defined as an aspect so it can be applied independently of the document type.
   • Allow you to view MS Office documents and PDFs from your email client. With OpsMailmanager you can for example view a Word document that was added via the Alfresco Web Client interface or CIFS from within MS Outlook .

4. There is already an Email Archiving Proxy project under SourceForge, can't we just use it instead?

   Project URL: http://sourceforge.net/projects/emailarchiving/

   The Inovox email archiving solution is a stand-alone proxy that provides support for either the SMTP protocol or the POP3 protocol. The proxy is setup to intercept all the traffic to your SMTP server or from your POP server. When the traffic is intercepted it is archived by one or more archiving plug-ins. The following picture illustrates the use of an Alfresco archiving plug-in (there is no Alfresco archiving plug-in available with the proxy, but this is how it is supposed to work):

    

   

    

   So what it allows you to do is:

   • Save any email that you send in Alfresco
   • Save any email that you receive via POP in Alfresco

   What it does NOT allow you to do, but that is supported in OpsMailmanager, is:

   • Support email clients that use MS Exchange, IMAP, Lotus Notes, and Novell GroupWise
   • Select what emails you want to store in the content repository, all are stored (a global filter component is available but one filter configuration might suit one user but not someone else)
   • Select where you want to store each email or a group of emails
   • Attach extra domain-specific metadata to emails added to the repository, there is no way to provide this when the email is stored via the proxy
   • Allow you to view MS Office documents and PDFs from your email client. With OpsMailmanager you can for example view a Word document that was added via the Alfresco Web Client interface or CIFS from within MS Outlook .

5. The emails added to the Alfresco store have default names, such as Email-10-22.eml. Can the names be changed?

   Yes, you can use different naming strategies such as date, time and subject. the Developers Guide made available to customers as part of the annual support subscription explains how to configure different naming strategies.

6. When I am subscribing to folders I do not see all of them, what's wrong?

   Check with your Alfresco and OpsMailmanager administrator if you have permission to see all folders. If you do not have permission to see all folders then they will not show up in the 'Subscribe' dialog in your e-mail client.

MS Outlook

1. I'm using MS Outlook, can't I just use the Alfresco Outlook plug-in?

   Project URL: http://forge.alfresco.com/projects/outlook-addin/

   This is an add-in to MS Outlook 2002/2003 that allows users to record emails from the Outlook interface to the Alfresco repository 1.3.x/1.4.x using web services.

   There is little or no activity around this project and it doesn't support later versions of Alfresco.

   This plug-in allows you to:

   • Add an email to a configured folder in Alfresco via a 'Record' button.
   • Add an email to any folder via the 'Record To' button.
   • If the emails have attachments, they will automatically be saved in a space in Alfresco inside the selected node to contain the emails. The attachments space is 'Attachments/attchs_name'.
   • The email name is the username logged on to Windows + '_' + the current time stamp from the local machine in ticks. An example of the email name is 'Winuser_123456789012345678'.

   What it does NOT allow you to do, and that is supported in OpsMailmanager, is:

   • View the emails you added to Alfresco from your email client
   • Use a custom naming strategy for email nodes in Alfresco
   • Attach domain specific metadata to emails
   • View documents in the repository from your email client
   • Integrate the email information with the document information
   • Support email clients such as Lotus Notes and Thunderbird

2. I have setup a new account but I cannot see any folders under the Alfresco CMS/Inbox, what should I do?

   You have to subscribe to folders before you can see them in Outlook.

   1. Right click on the Alfresco CMS top level account folder in Outlook
   2. From the popup menu select IMAP Folders...
   3. In the IMAP Folders dialog click the Query button
   4. From the list of folders select /Inbox/Company Home/User Homes/<your first name> and any other folders you want to access. Any folder that you see in the list will be accessible, folders that you do not have permission to access will not show up in the list.
   5. Click the Subscribe button
   6. Click the OK button
   7. If you click on the Inbox and expand the folder structure under it you should see something like:
      
      

3. I added a folder via the Alfresco Web Client but I cannot see it in the email client, what's wrong?

   You have to subscribe to the folder before you can see it in Outlook.

4. I deleted a folder via the Alfresco Web Client but it is still there in the email client, what should I do?

   In the Outlook interface you have to:

   1. Right click on the top level account folder name such as Alfresco CMS
   2. Then select Update Folder List for the deleted folder to disappear.

5. I get a 'not connected' error when trying to add an email, what should I do?

   Click on your Inbox and then press F9. This will make Outlook re-connect to OpsMailmanager. Try adding the email again.

Lotus Notes 8

1. Some emails are blank when I open them, what is going on?

   These are probably emails that have been deleted via the Alfresco Web Client interface or via other email clients.

   You have to run a refresh of summaries as follows:

   1. Select Actions from main menu
   2. Select Refresh from the Tools menu.
   3. Select Summaries from the Refresh menu

   This will remove any deleted emails from the folder.

2. Why does renaming folders not work?

   Renaming folders does not work as Lotus Notes does not call the server with the IMAP RENAME command.