Helpful Tips
April 2002
Proper Configuration Settings for Email Notifications
Journyx Timesheet offers a variety of automatic email notifications that are triggered by milestones in an approval process. Initial configuration of your email notifications will be a snap provided that you review the following steps & issues:
- Everyone who should receive email must have the Extra User Field for Email Address populated with a working mail address. Note that if Timesheet is outside of your firewall you may need to use the public email address, or if it is inside your firewall you may need to use a special internal address. If you believe this could be an issue, speak to your network administrator.
- All email notifications are triggered by approval processes that have at least one email notification enabled. In order to receive notifications, an employee must be affiliated with an approval process - either as an approver or approvee. Obviously you should enable only the emails you want sent. For testing purposes turn on the 'Notify the Manager When Submitted' and 'Notify the User When Rejected' mails so that you can submit and reject over and over again to test if those notifications arrive. The remainder of the notifications are only sent at a specified time (i.e., 2 days after a period has ended).
- A timesheet/expensesheet/mileagesheet must exist for the period in question. If a user has never logged in, and if an administrator or timekeeper has not pulled up the user's entry screen for the current period, then that sheet does not yet exist in the database. Email notifications are a function of the sheet, and if a sheet for the user for a period does not exist, then no notifications will be mailed. This feature blocks the generation of notifications for former/inactive employees. If the user is not able to log in for a given period, the Administrator may pull up the user's timesheet from the Time Keeping screen to create the timesheet.
- There are several settings in Global Preferences and Batch Email Settings that must be configured correctly in order to use email notifications.These options can be found by going to Global Preferences>>Miscellaneous Options>>Communications.
- Fully Qualified Domain Name Of This Server
Must contain the correct name of your server. Ask your network administrator if you need help. - SMTP mail server name
Must be correct. This name might vary from the name you commonly use if your server is outside of the firewall. For instance, our PCs inside of the Journyx firewall use the SMTP mail server name of "fred" and all servers outside of the firewall use "wilma.journyx.com". - From address of mail sent by jtime
This usually must be a valid email address or the email server will reject all mails. We recommend that you use a from address that allows your users to respond to a Timesheet Administrator. Most customers create an email alias called "timesheet@yourcompanynamehere.com" that sends mail to all of the Timesheet Administrators. - Do not process emails for timesheets before date
This field requires a date in the YYYYMMDD format. Any sheet that starts before this date will not trigger an email notification. - Are approval emails activated?
Setting this flag to "No" will completely disable notifications. After you restore your database using the restoredb command, this flag is always changed to "No" as a precaution to keep unnecessary email notifications from being sent. You should look at your submitted sheets before re-enabling this feature when restoring your database.
- Fully Qualified Domain Name Of This Server
A Common User Login Error
If one of your employees is getting an error when they try to save records that reads "unable to add record, user.bob is not a valid user for user Bob.none", then one of two possible actions has caused this error.
First, either you or the person for whom you are time keeping has been misconfigured in a specific way. The problem stems from the fact that the employee's Role/Authority is not in his/her Group. For instance, if "Joe" is a "Punch User", and "Joe" is in the "Engineers" Group, but the Role/Authority of "Punch User" is not in the "Engineers" Group, then you will get the exact error message above. In order to correct the problem, you can just modify the Group to include the appropriate Role.
The second action that can cause the above error is logging in to Timesheet with the wrong case in your login ID (i.e., "bob" instead of "Bob"). Timesheet will allow you to login but will not allow you to create or modify records. Ideally the program should not allow you to login, but not all currently supported databases control for case sensitivity. In all future releases of Timesheet, beginning with version 5.0, supported databases will be required to check for case. Once this change takes effect, users will not be able to login at all unless they use the correct case.
