How to set up email notifications for leave requests – 6 – Troubleshooting

This is the final post in the series, but my plan is to keep it up to date with issues that me or my team encountered while setting up email notifications. It’s going to be a bit like an FAQ list, so when it gets a bit long, using the page search function might come in handy.

Exchange setup doesn’t work

When we first went to set this up on our internal environment, there was a problem with using the exchange setup which needed a platform update from Microsoft to fix. It really should ‘just work’. If it doesn’t, log a call via LCS (Lifecycle Services) and have someone look at it. Or use the SMTP setup option.

The emails don’t show up in my email send log at all

This sounds like there’s a problem with your workflow. Given that the workflows are all set up pretty effectively out of the box, it might be a data problem. The manager approval we used in this example is dependent on the line management position hierarchy. If there are gaps in that, your workflows will fail, and emails won’t be generated. To check your workflow status, go to System Administration > Links > Workflow > Workflow history. Usually there are pretty good error messages in there which will point you to the problem.

The email status goes from ‘Waiting’ to ‘Failed’

Whenever I saw this it was a problem with the email template setup I’d done in step 3. More often than not, the email address I’d entered wasn’t valid. Remember it doesn’t seem to like shared mailboxes. Better to use a system account. Try testing using your own email address first, and if that still doesn’t work, you know the template probably isn’t the problem.

My users aren’t getting the emails

First of all, check that their user account (NOT their worker record) has an email address entered against it. Then check their individual user preferences. There’s a setting in their user account which basically means they can choose not to get workflow notifications by email. Go into the user account, then hit ‘user options’ on the ribbon. On the ‘workflow’ tab, check that ‘Send notifications in email’ is set to ‘Yes’, and that they haven’t set up any delegates. Now test again. If that also fails, check your workflow (System Administration > Links > Workflow > Workflow history) for assignment issues – maybe the hierarchy isn’t setup how you think it should be.

I’m making changes to the email template but they’re not reflected in the messages that are going out

Guilty as charged of this one. Remember this particular workflow is legal entity specific. So you have to be editing the template and the workflow in which the requesting worker is employed, because that’s the one that’s being triggered. Editing a template in DAT is not going to help if your worker is employed in one of your actual legal entities. Also worth bearing in mind that once an email is in the send queue, changes you make to the template won’t affect it any more. So if you’re running the email distributor batch only occasionally, and there are a few items in the queue, remember that older items will be based on older config.