In the previous post in the series, we delved into some more advanced features. This post brings these features together and explains how they’re utilised to send emails, print files or upload files to file servers.
Ad-Hoc
An Outbound Communication Document can be created, populated and sent manually. This could be as simple as a text-only email. However, EDP also enables a user to upload existing files from their machine, generate new files using the File Generators or refer to Items on other Documents and then send those, or a subset thereof, to multiple destinations such as printers or email recipients at the same time.
You also have the option to append PDF files together before transmission. For example, if you have a standard Terms of Business that needs to be in every file, you can refer to it on its Document and specify that it’s appended to the end of your uploaded or generated PDFs. You can even specify this happens only to the email attachments, not to those sent to the printer.
Like all other Documents, these can be linked to data throughout EDP.
Outbound Processes
There is configuration to be done within a Document to send an email, such as filling in the Subject, Body and Recipients; this is not something you want to do every time you need to send a statement or acknowledge an order. To overcome this, EDP includes Outbound Processes.
An individual Outbound Process operates on a single type of data, such as Invoices, and details how one or more Documents should be populated to fulfil a given use case. For example, a Process might exist to generate a Document against a Sales Order that sends an acknowledgement to the Contact(s) on the Order.
These Outbound Processes can be started by a user from a Menu or they can be fired off during the processing of other data, such as a posting routine. The population and transmission can happen completely in the background, or you can choose to preview the fully populated Document and send it manually.
EDP ERP ships with a bunch of existing Processes that can be customised for your business' needs or brand new ones can be created for a use case unique to you.