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Add ability to upload documents via an email reply

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Level 9

3/30/17

When someone gets an update from workfront in their email they may add an attachment. Right now workfront ignores the attachment and you have no idea that there was an attachment.

We need attachments from our clients, they are used to submitting attachments via helpdesk.

Workaround: We built a flow in Azuqua (Azuqua doesn't handle attachments via gmail yet so it took some extra work but it works) that looks at every email coming in and sends them to workfront. This flow beats workfront by 2-40 minutes in processing the attachments before the update is posted to workfront.

15 Comments

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Level 2

4/3/17

Actually workfront already captures attachments - what you are looking for specifically is for workfront to capture images and attachments pasted into the body of the email. Workfront does a horrible job of capturing formatting from the body of email and ignores any pasted screenshots for images or files in the body of the email.

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Level 3

4/10/17

We aren't seeing attachments come through email when someone replies to a comment - my implementation consultant told me this was a limitation that wasn't documented. It's certainly documented that you can submit documents when sending a new issue in through the request queue, but not for replies.

If someone does have the ability to receive attachments through POP email replies, please let me know! We have users sending in attachments every day through replies that we have to go back and ask them to upload; it's a very poor process.

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Level 9

4/14/17

Jennifer,

We do have a solution, but it's basically custom code (Using Azuqua but not in a friendly way). We parse our google inbox (Same inbox inbound POP3 is pointed to) for attachments and then upload them to workfront, it has some glitches like it uploads avatars of our users pretty regularly but we take that trade off for attachments.

I'd be happy to talk more about this if you'd like to!

Thanks

-Derek

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Level 3

8/1/17

Ick. I suppose we could do that as well but it would certainly be better (and more intuitive) if attachments were passed through the POP email replies.

Although, since we're using O365 I suppose I could take a look at Microsoft Flow... if an email comes into that POP account with an attachment it could forward a copy to our design support team. Manual, not ideal, but I'm putting it on my list of things to look at.

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Level 1

11/20/17

I absolutely support the idea to add document from attachment when replying to email notification. Users expect that the attachment is delivered and we deal with that misunderstanding very often.

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Level 3

3/16/18

I'm surprised this hasn't gotten more traction. This is a major issue for us. Explaining to users that you can reply, but you have to log in to upload docs seems silly and our end users always forget since they don't get any kind of indication that the attachment didn't go through.

I upvoted this and posted something in the discussion forum to maybe get this more attention. Fingers crossed!

https://community.workfront.com/discussions/community-home/digestviewer/viewthread?GroupId=151&Messa....

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Level 9

4/19/18

Yeah I"m not sure how it's not a bigger deal for everyone either! Our customers simply won't allow us to not offer this so we have to.

The only reasons that make sense to me are that either a lot of workfront customers don't respond to workfront emails via email, they just use the emails as notifications and log into the system which makes a lot of sense and gets rid of this problem.

The other reason may be that existing workfront customers don't realize this is a problem anymore because a workaround is already embedded into everyone's process.