Participating Right From Email

So most of us probably still live very much in an email world. You may love facebook, twitter, etc to communicate with your friends and family, but from a business point of view email is still king. So here are some tips for getting the most out of Launchpad right from within your email client. Of course we would love you to log into Launchpad everyday, but you can still do quite a bit without even having to open up a browser.

STARTING DISCUSSIONS BY SENDING AN EMAIL

So you are on a plane building the next great RhoElements application and you come across something you can't figure out - so what would you do? When you land you would probably get caught up in the hundreds of emails waiting for you and forget to post the question when you get back to your office. Well, what you could have done was to send an email while on the plane and when you you land your email would sync and your question would be posted to the discussion forums automatically. By the time you get back to your office, someone would probably have an answer posted to your question. Sounds good? Well let's get you setup so that you can fully take advantage of this. The way this works is that each Space has a unique email address. When you navigate to each space, in the actions menu you will see a link Create by email.

Remember that each space has a unique email address. So you will have to repeat this for all of the spaces you wish to start a discussion for.In the example above the email address that I will get from clicking the menu will only be for the Installation Space inside the RhoElements - The specified item was not found.. Once you click this menu you will see a popup dialog giving you an option to download a vCard:

Select Discussion and Download vCards. You can then import these vCards into your email program (if it didn't already auto start) and save them as any other contact. So now when you address an email to that contact, it will automatically get inserted into the space that the email address is linked to.

RESPONDING VIA EMAIL

So we just went over how to start a Launchpad Discussion using your email client, now lets discuss how you can respond right from within your email client as well. The first thing to do is to make sure you are following the spaces that we have. Read the prior post on how to do that. You also need to make sure your preferences are checked so that the All Activity option is checked. All Activity will send you individual emails each time a new discussion is posted.

Now initially you may balk at this, but alas there is a way to manage it quite easily. The emails that come in are very 'rule friendly'. Each email will come from motorola-dev@sgaur.hosted.jivesoftware.com (even though it shows the person's name that created the discussion, you can still easily create an email rule to say put these emails in a certain folder for your "daily perusal" later. Also the subject of the email also has the name of the space in it, so you could additionally setup an email rule around that to even further divide them.

Even if you do not want to setup these email rules to manage them there will be so much great content in the details of these emails, I would hate for you to miss them by just getting a daily digest. So now when you see an email come in about a topic you either want to find more about or have a possible answer for, you can simply just respond right in your email client. The platform automagically takes just what you typed in an inserts it as a reply just as if you logged into your browser and filled out the reply form.