My Boss going crazy: database access via email

[uladzik]

Dear gurus,

I have purely theoretical question. We have a Web-base application for our consultants (a virtual helpdesk). There are two groups of users: experts (or consultants) that answer questions on-line, and normal mortal users who ask those (sometimes stupid ) questions.

An expert goes to a special Web page protected by password, looks through all the questions and answers some of the them in a Web-based form. His/her answer gets stored to the database and also a copy of the answer gets sent to the user who asked the question.

Experts are not very computer-friendly and they would like to answer questions exactly the way they did before, i.e. via e-mail. So my boss asked if it's possible to setup a special e-mail account on the mail server that would handle emails from our experts, somehow analyze it and store appropriate data in the database.

I think I am aware of all the difficulties involved, but I would be happy to hear your own comments regarding the whole scheme. How do you envision the whole thing? How would you setup such an automated email account? What techonologies/protocols/languages would be involved? Has anyone done this thing before? Is there anything related on the Web?

Just FYI, the original Heldesk application runs on Windows NT, IIS, and it's implemented in ASP and VBScript (so that's basically what I know); Access and SQL Server as backend.

Thank you very much in advance!
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
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http://www.geocities.com/uladzik/

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[Tim1]

Hi,

It sounds like you really need a web based report delivery package to perform the task. It won't actually email the answer to the question asker, but it will send him a note to say an answer is there, plus a hot-link to the answer.

You could try talking to a few companies see if they can help.

HTH

Tim

 

[uladzik]

Tim, thanks for your help. Actually, I can take care of programming. My main concern is how do I do it on the Microsoft Exchange server? Thanks again.
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http://www.geocities.com/uladzik/

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[culshaja]

One of my colleagues did something VERY similar to what you want. He used Outlook and built an outlook add-in that used public folders and when mail arrived, the mail was processed and dependant on what setting he had specified would either go into a SQL Server database, or into another data store.

You could try having a machine up and running with Outlook permenantly open logged into the requisite account. This outlook has a rule which then sends the mail to a specific folder. The outlook add-in then scans this folder and does stuff with the contents. I think he had to get the data via an outlook form though. Might be able to do it different somehow.

James James Culshaw
jculshaw@active-data-solutions.co.uk

http://www.active-data-solutions.co.uk

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