E-mail Templates: reuse responses, create contact forms
Community, Tips & Tricks October 16th, 2008
posted by Joe GeckEver find yourself retyping the same responses over and over again? If you can generalize what you write without changing much, then chances are you can benefit from using E-mail Templates. With templates you can create reusable blocks of text that can be automatically inserted into any message you see fit.
You can of course save and reuse “thank you” messages, newsletters, and announcements, but one of my favorite uses for templates is call logging. With the right outline in place, your workers can capture all the right information in a standard layout. To create a call logging form, go to the mail section and click ‘log message’, ‘E-mail Templates’. and then ‘Create Template’.
Everything here should be fairly self-explanatory — by specifying a ‘folder’ you can categorize templates into use cases, and with placeholders you can automatically sub in values, such as your name and job title.
Once you save your template, it’s ready for use! From now on you can add this text into any message you compose with a couple of clicks. Just click ‘E-mail Templates’ and then click the name of your template, the text will be inserted into the message wherever you left the blinking cursor.
Pretty simple, no? However there are a couple caveats with E-mail Templates you should be aware of. One, templates are “shared” and can be used by any worker in your Helpdesk, i.e. there is no permission system. And two, “send mail”, “log message” and replies are three separate sets of templates, meaning templates created in one area are not saved in the other. If you frown on either behavior, there are two open JIRA issues you can vote on: CHD-828 and CHD-712.
So the next time you come up with a golden reply to a common question, go ahead and save it as a template — the benefits far outweigh the hassle. When used properly everyone has to do less typing, reducing spelling mistakes and embarrassing omissions, and perhaps more importantly saving company time. Even if you only use a template a couple of times, you can always delete it later.
Got any templates you like to use? Share them with us in the comments.
-joegeck@wgm
I was hoping this was going to be the golden new feature I was looking for, but it sounds like it’s basically just the templates feature from previous versions with a few new bells?
What I was hoping was that you were going to give us some ability to define “placeholders” in our messages which can give us the ability to create useful snippets which can be inserted on demand.
We have some common examples like login instructions for our customers, or nameserver addresses etc. - these are short text blocks which we find ourselves constantly re-typing to fit into part of a larger specific email. This means that a full template reply (in cerb. 3.6 anyway) doesn’t fit the job too well, as you have to make extensive use of cut/paste to get this functionality.
The feature I have in mind is something they had in an older version of Fogbugz (http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBUGZ/) - I’m not sure if it’s in latest one but I guess it will be…
When I used it within that (for bug tracking of course) I found it to be a huge timesaver… Is this something which is planned (or has anyone spotted a similar request in JIRA)?
I’m sorry you are disappointed, Damien. Unfortunately my how-to articles tend to be for new users and not a showcase for an exciting new feature not found in Cerb 2x/3x. Jeff@WGM’s write-ups are more for announcing a new feature, so keep an eye on his posts. On the positive side, one of the goals of highlighting a feature in Cerb4 is to generate more community feedback. Oftentimes direct feedback like yours, does not show up in the forums unless someone has found a bug related to the feature.
Your feedback is a good one and I’m going to file your comment as a new feature request (it’s definitely not in JIRA already). I’m sure the developers will get a kick out of it.
http://www.wgmdev.com/jira/browse/CHD-870
Thanks again.
Unfortunately there is a major bug with templates that if you select a folder from the drop down you are unable to insert any templates by clicking on the links. Only if you do not click on the folder drop down will it insert templates.
Yeah that’s definitely a problem I had forgotten about and I believe this is already documented in JIRA as CHD-827. I bumped the priority to Must Fix and added it to a future milestone release. Thanks for reminding us of the situation.
Can’t insert Template from a specific folder
http://www.wgmdev.com/jira/browse/CHD-827