Rest Professional Cannot detect sent Emails to save to Document Management

Overview

When sending an email from one of the Master Files within REST Professional, you have the option to save a copy of this email into the preferred document management system. If this option is selected, REST Professional will send an instruction to Outlook (via Microsoft Office Automation) to create an email and if no further input from the operator is required, send the email. Once sent, REST Professional will send another instruction to Outlook tasking it to find the email just sent, and save it into a specific location (normally within the ‘Documents’ folder on the server. Once Outlook has saved the email in the requested location, control returns to the REST Professional program. With fileSMART, Archive Wrapper obtains the email from Outlook as well as relevant information from REST Professional, to save the email to the correct location for the fileSMART workflow.

If the email is sent, but REST Professional’s polling of Outlook does not return a confirmation that the email has been located and saved as requested within a reasonable time frame, you may receive the following message:

This is a courtesy message to advise the operator that Outlook was unable to complete the task of finding and saving the email in time, so that the operator can then locate and save the email themselves. These can be saved by dragging and dropping the email from the sent items folder into the relevant folder if using the REST Professional document management system or by using the fileSMART Plugin within Outlook to save the item with the appropriate fileSMART labels. 

Common Causes 

• Some computers, at some sites require that Outlook be open for these automated requests to work. This is an issue with Outlook not REST Professional.
• This can caused by the email sitting in the “Outbox” instead of being placed in “Sent items”.  Generally due to the email being a generous size, therefore taking some time to send the email which can be compounded by the network connection speed to the mail server at that time.
• This has also been caused by anti-virus/internet security software interfering with this process and in this case, your IT Support person should be asked to investigate further
• If the problem is intermittent then something is changing to impact on Outlook's ability to find and save the email in time. This could be related to Outlook not sending the email promptly or once again antivirus/internet security software. Other things to check are to ensure that emails are sent directly to the mail server and not held up in the Outbox. Also decrease the size of the sent items folder my moving emails into other folders. The larger the sent items folder the longer it takes Outlook to find the requested email.
• If the operator has multiple sent items folders in their Outlook, Outlook will generally scan the top Sent Items folder only. It is not uncommon for operators to have multiple sent items as part of other mailboxes (Gmail, Archive etc…). Ensure that the Sent Items folder being used is the top Sent Items folder in Outlook.  Also ensure that the default data file is the correct one for the default email account in Outlook