Adding a contact in Autotask from ATES
When the Add Ticket Email Service (ATES) processes an incoming email message it compares the incoming customer information to your Autotask organizations.
- If ATES identifies an Autotask organization Your Autotask instance may be configured to use one of the following terms instead: Account, Business Unit, Client Company, Customer, Site. that corresponds to the incoming XML customer information, but cannot find a matching contact in the organization information, and the XML does not include the Contact element, the service does not assign a contact to the ticket.
A message is added to the ticket indicating that no match was found for the contact email address submitted with the alert email.
- If the incoming XML includes the contact element, the Web Services attempt to add a contact using the incoming Contact element information.
NOTE The Contact element is not required but strongly recommended for users who want to use Autotask workflow rules to set up a system to notify contacts at ticket creation.
The following is the contact element tag: <Contact name="Firstname Lastname"/>
For an example of an XML token that includes the Contact name tag, refer to Sample message XML.
Parsing the contact element content
The content can be parsed from the From: name of the incoming email.
For example, if using a third party email parser to forward alerts to the Service, the following tag can be inserted between the Autotask opening and closing tags in the Plain Text Body field under %msg_body%
<Contact name="%msg_fromname"/>
What happens when the XML contains a contact name value
If the XML contains the optional Contact name value, the following occurs:
- The service attempts to match the Customer name and Email name values to an Autotask organization and contact as outlined in the procedures above.
If a matching organization is found for the customer name value, but no matching contact is found for the organization, the service attempts to create a contact in Autotask.
The following fields are completed based on information parsed from the incoming email: First Name, Last Name, Organization, and Email Address
- If no value is available for any field, the value is set to unknown.
- User-Defined Fields, including required fields are ignored, unless a default value was configured.
