Task and Project Task Approval by Email
When a person’s approval is needed for a task or a project task, and that person has not turned off email notifications, an email is sent that can contain links to approve or reject the approval task. These links take this person directly to the task in 4me. It is now possible to include links in these emails that enable people to approve or reject the task by replying to that email. Although this method is less secure (because logging in to 4me is not required) it is sometimes preferred by managers who receive approval tasks from various systems.
Two new email template fields have been made available for the email templates ‘Task Assigned to Approver’ and ‘Project Task Approver Assignment’:
{{approve_task_by_email_link}}
and{{reject_task_by_email_link}}
.
To allow people to approve tasks by email, a new setting in the ‘Email Policy’ section of the settings console must be enabled, called ‘Allow (project) task approvers to approve or reject by sending an email’
. When that setting is enabled, fields for defining the approval token and the rejection token appear.
By default, these tokens are set to ✔️ and ❌ respectively, but they may be changed. If a person receives an approval email with the links as described above, following that link will create a reply to that email with the correct token and task ID already in the header. For an approval, a note in the body of the email is only required if that is configured in the Note behavior
field of the corresponding task template. For a rejection, adding a reason in the body of the email is always required. Approvals and rejections by email appear as notes in the task.
In some situations, multiple approvals are required to approve a single task. This can be configured in the task template, using the Required approvals
field. To make it more evident if a task was approved or rejected, be it by email or from the user interface, a system note is now generated as soon as enough approvals have been given, or when one rejection is given.