Template visibility and creating personal templates

The template entity has a special 'visibility' property that means it can be set to be seen Organization-wide. In this mode you don't have the granularity of access control but it is simpler to administer. In order to gain finer control of access it's necessary to use Personal (Individual) templates that have the same access control features as most other record types. The [New Personal Template] button allows you the option of creating a new template with visibility initially set to Personal. See later for how to create a copy of an existing template.

Important: Before you change the visibility of the built-in templates you should be sure to first re-assign them to a 'real' user. By default these are owned by SYSTEM and will become totally invisible if you miss this first step.

Assigning and sharing templates

The [Assign Template] ribbon button launches the standard CRM dialog, which allows you to re-assign the selected templates to a specified user or team. If these templates are set to Personal visibility, then you can use the [Share Template] ribbon button to control which users and teams have the specified level of record access control applied.

Copying or moving templates and filtered views

Have you ever been hindered by the difficulty of providing sensible ways to categorize and filter your email templates? As VEM makes extensive use of email templates we felt it was important to be able to manage them in a reasonable fashion.

The [Copy Template] ribbon button allows you to easily and quickly make copies of existing templates. You can optionally, using the split-button dropdown, copy the templates to a specified 'filtered view'. To achieve this we are using an attribute that is normally unused ISN (importsequencenumber) to define the filtered views, then we list these as target views on a Copy Template ribbon button. Each time you copy a template VEM appends a 'datetime' suffix to the title to ease identification.

If you use the [Archive or Move Template] function then VEM will take a snapshot of the existing template properties before deleting it and re-creating another with the same templateid and properties, optionally with an ISN filter. Consistency of the templateid allows you for example to remove a monthly newsletter from a 'working' filtered view to an 'archived' one without affecting usage of this template as a landing page for sent email activities.

You can define as many views as you need and these will be shown dynamically on the ribbon button. For instance, you can now choose to define a number of master templates that marketing people can copy to update for each weekly or monthly newsletter. Remember, if you wish to provide a link within the outgoing email to 'View online' you need to keep a copy of a specific newsletter template for as long as you might have recipients reading and responding to it, so you might consider the 'Newsletter Templates' to be an archive for at least 6 months or so.

Note: The dynamic listing of views exposes an issue in the CRM Outlook client (web client is OK) that we hope will be fixed soon. Meantime target views need to be statically defined as we have for the ones shown in the screenshot.

Email test

When creating a new template, or preparing for a new 'eBlast', it is important to first test how your email will look and perform interactively in different email readers. With this new feature you can do this in fewer clicks directly from the templates grid. Simply choose the template you wish to test and press the [Email Test] ribbon button.

You are first presented with a filtered lookup of your test recipients (lead, contact or account), from which you can select one or more records. After this the ribbon function begins creating and sending rendered emails and meantime spawns a modeless status dialog so you see this happening as it refreshes once a second, until all emails are sent.

On the VEM2011 solution configuration page you can define the fetchxml filter that is used for your test recipients, similar to: <filter><condition attribute="emailaddress1" operator="like" value="%test.acme.com" /></filter>

Template properties and datafields editing

Hitherto in VEM2011 we have positioned the VEM template editor as being useful for editing the HTML body of the template, whilst still requiring the native template editor for setting title, subject, description etc. and editing standard datafields. Now, you can do all this within the VEM editor.

CodeMirror source editing

In order to give a better source editing experience we have integrated CodeMirror. This has line-numbering, colour-coded tags, attributes and values and much more...