Organisations may wish to drive departmental workflows from the Platform. While we strongly recommend use of APIs for integration, it may be that the expertise is not available to do this. The Whitespace Platform can be configured to send email notifications to users as their counter-parties send them messages or perform actions, and these emails can in turn trigger Outlook rules.
In the following example, we look at a common workflow that forwards the notification email to a specific team, when a broker signs a risk. The screen-shots are taken from Outlook for Mac, but the principles should be common across platforms.
The Notification email
Whitespace notification emails contain a very limited set of information, but this is still rich enough to be of use
- Source email address: Use this to limit rules to the Whitespace notifications engine
- Destination email address: This reflects the address configured. Depending on how you set it, this may help in creating rules
- Date: Date notification sent
- Subject: Use this to limit rules to just the occurrences you require
- Originator: The company name the message is from
- Link ("Open in Whitespace"): The url to take the user to the record in question.
e.g. https://testing.whitespace.co.uk/p/ICADCAD6E3-9C60-49EC-A4E8-958949E4EC09::FO::AJWC::MARINEINLAND
Because this refers to the JSON document ID, which has a structured naming convention, parts or all of it can be used in the rule.
Notifications are driven by inbound activities, so are not available on actions that the user takes. For example, the notification of a Written Line is driven from underwriter to broker, so cannot be passed directly to an underwriting technician/team.
Step 1: Configuring Notifications
By default email notifications are turned off, but it is simple for administrators to configure them in the Admin Console.
Authorised users can access the Admin console via the user's profile icon (top right)
From here, navigate to the Users tab and select the user you would like to configure:
Click on the item to edit the user's details:
Set the Notification Email to the address you would like notifications to be delivered to, then hit OK to save. On the next page, click Verify, then Save All, then Publish.
Step 2: Setting Rules in Outlook
The following set-up would move all notifications of Signed Lines on risks written by the MARINEINLAND to a specific folder. The action might simply be to move the email to a folder, or it might forward the notification to another team.
Outlook rules are fairly limited in capabilities. Other tools, such as Microsoft Flow allow more powerful workflows to be built.
In this case the body of the text includes the URL, which in turn contains the team name (this may only be available on certain document types)
Using the Notification
If a user is logged into the Platform and has sufficient permissions (i.e. is a member of the appropriate team), clicking on the URL will take them to the risk and associated docuemnts.
