13 Aralık 2007 Perşembe

E-Mail Templates

If E-mail templates behaved exactly like Contract and Article templates, you might expect to select an E-mail
template when you create a new e-mail. However, E-mail templates provide much more functionality than the
Contract and Article templates. You can use E-mail templates in the following ways:
Insert templates into e-mail messages Instead of selecting an E-mail template to create a new e-mail
message, you can insert an E-mail template into the body of an e-mail message that a user is composing.
This allows you to insert multiple E-mail templates into a single e-mail message if necessary.
Send direct e-mail by using templates You can use E-mail templates to send the same e-mail message
to multiple records. For example, you could use the Direct E-mail feature (which uses E-mail templates) to
send the same message to 500 Contacts.

Reference E-mail templates in workflow rules You can reference E-mail templates within Microsoft
CRM workflow to accomplish many types of business process automation techniques. Chapter 8,
"Workflow," describes in detail how to set up and create workflow rules.

Microsoft CRM uses E-mail templates primarily for external communications to Contact and Account records,
but you can also use E-mail templates for internal e-mail between users.

In addition to being accessible from different areas of the Microsoft CRM application, E-mail templates have
the following unique features:

Data fields You can insert data fields into E-mail templates that Microsoft CRM will dynamically populate
on usage. For example, if you wanted to send an e-mail message to 20 people and address each
recipient by his or her first name, you would insert a first name data field into the E-mail template. When
Microsoft CRM sends the message, it would automatically populate the correct first name value in the
data field for each of the 20 recipients.
User and organization ownership All the Contract and Article templates are owned by the organization,
but users with the appropriate security privileges can create their own personal E-mail templates for their
exclusive use. Of course, you can also create organization E-mail templates for use by all users. Chapter
3 explains more about organization and user ownership of records.
Template types For each E-mail template that you create, you must specify to which single entity (such
as Lead or Opportunity) the template applies. You can also create a Global template for use with multiple
entities.
Let's get into the details of working with E-mail templates. In this chapter, we will examine accessing E-mail
templates by using the Direct E-mail feature and by inserting E-mail templates into an e-mail message.
Chapter 8 explains the use of E-mail templates in workflow rules.

Sending Direct E-Mail

If you want to send an e-mail message to multiple records in your database, the Direct E-mail feature allows
you to select recipients in a grid and then choose an E-mail template that you want to send. As we mentioned,
you can also include data fields in E-mail templates that Microsoft CRM dynamically populates with information
specific to each recipient. You can create and use E-mail templates for each of the following types of entity
records:

Lead

Opportunity

Account

Contact

Quote

Order

Invoice

Case

Contract

Service Activity

You can access the Direct E-mail feature from the grid toolbar for these types of entities. Figure 2-6 shows the
Direct E-mail button for the Leads entity. You will not see the Direct E-mail button in the Web client if you have
Microsoft Outlook opened with the Microsoft CRM client for Outlook installed.

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