#SCSM Simple Solution: No Email… [Unless]

So I’m working with a client and they came to me with a peculiar request… We want Service Manager to have email, but not really…

[Insert long pause here]

Ok, I say… what’s that really mean?

Here is the scenario my client breaks down to me. “We want a solution where we can send notifications out to our end-users and analysts alike, but what we don’t want is for people to send emails into the system. We want all requests to come in through the Service Manager Self-Service Portal.”

Well, that sounds cool, I like the idea – so what’s the rub?

Here’s the catch, “We do want end users to be able to reply to notifications, like the ones they receive after a ticket is opened, but we don’t want them initiating incidents via email.”

There’s obviously no setting in the Service Manager Exchange Connector that will allow this to happen, so I reached out to my Messaging team at Catapult, and I received some great advice from Sean McNeill – Catapult’s very own Office 365 MVP.

Sean advised me to setup a Transport Rule in Exchange (2010 in this case) that would inspect where the message was going to (addressed to) and reject anything that didn’t have the reply prefix applied to the subject line! Easy as that.

So here’s what my Exchange Transport Rule looks like

1. You can see that the rule is applied to messages sent to the Service Manager Workflow Account (or the friendly alias, whichever you use) SCSMwkflow@company.com
2. We can specify the bounce message that the user will receive if the criteria is not met
3. We finish it up and it is off and working

What sounded like a complex request was solved in just a few minutes with a little Exchange know-how!

I’m glad there are people in this world, like Sean McNeill that can just whip these answers out of their back pocket, but if you are like me and haven’t touched Exchange in quite some time, I hope this article helps you out!

Below, find the quick screenshots I grabbed once the rule was setup and tested.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you have another way of tackling this, please leave comments below!

Chris Ross
Managing Consultant @ Catapult Systems, and Microsoft MVP – Cloud and Data Center Management
Twitter: @SCSMUS