Email/Document Marking - Important

[samwoo]

Hi,

We have a company policy that requires us to use Document / Email Marking for all documents and emails. We've been told that that the emails we are sending from within Hornbill does not include any form of Document Marking, and will need to going forward.

We currently use the following:

• ~[UNCLASSIFIED]~
• ~[OFFICIAL]~
• ~[OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE]~

This is appended to the end of the email after we press send in Outlook (or when we press Save in Office). We choose the type of marking depending on the sensitivity of the document. e.g (these examples are not neccesarily Hornbill related).

• System Admin Training ~[UNCLASSIFIED]~ This is simply an email containing the Agenda of the training course.
• Rent Account - wrong rent amount ~[OFFICIAL]~ This email contains a Rent Account Reference, Name, Address and the amount of money that should be assosciated with it
• Complete List of Tenant Details ~[OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE]~  This email contains every single detail of every tenant in the area including name, address, family members, disability, bank account details, contact details etc

Requests from me to Hornbill

1. Could we have a feature where could choose (from an editable simple list) what Document Marking to be appended to the end of the emails when emailling from within a request or from the email inbox area.
2. Could we also have an option that allows us to make this mandatory or not (for the benefit of other companies who use Hornbill, who might not need to use this feature).

The information sent from within Hornbill can be extremely sensitive, especially when dealing with data from an Application, so the Document Marking will help users to identify the sensitivity of the email when it arrives into their inbox.

Thanks,

Samuel

[Gerry]

Hi Samuel,

When you say appended to the end of the email, do you mean just like a signature, some additional templated content appended to the end of the message body? Also, you said Outlook has a feature for this? (sorry I am not an outlook expert). 

On the face of it, it does not seem like an unreasonable request, I am just pondering on the best way of specifying an implementation for this. Obviously if it gets appended in edit mode then a user could remove the content before sending etc.... so I am wondering what your current workflow is if you can share that would be useful. 

Gerry

[Steve Giller]

That looks like very similar to a snippet - only one that was (if the option was set) mandatory and fixed to the foot of the email.

Would that be a potential mechanism for achieving this?

[samwoo]

Hi @Gerry/ @DeadMeatGF,

I do apologise I actually meant the end of the email subject field.

When the emails are sent from within a call on Hornbill they use a predefined template we set up in the settings area. We cannot edit the subject line each time we send an email from within a ticket, and a single request could hold sensitive data or not each time an email is sent.

The idea i had would be a dropdown in the Email functionality within a ticket (maybe next to the "Send" button), which if you choose a marking defined from a Simple List will automatically append that marking to the email subject field when the email is sent. This gives the user control to choose what marking is required based on their email at the point just before sending it.

Snippets wont work as one cannot amend the subject field on the fly with it.

I'm not sure if it's directly an Outlook feature or it's a plugin that someone created but this is what we get when sending an email from within Outlook:

When pressing ok, whichever one we select will automatically get appended to the end of the email subject field in the format I mentioned above. (this should be configurable in a simple list)

Thanks,

Samuel

[Steve Giller]

@samwoo I wasn't suggesting snippets would work as-is, but if they were customised to add what you're requiring you could also have a setting that tells you where to insert the Mark (e.g. Prefix Subject/Append Suffix/Prefix Body/Append Body)

[Gerry]

@samwoo

Thanks for the response. OK that makes more sense now.  Yes I can see from the screen shot this is a separate application/plugin for Outlook.  http://www.360-systems.com/applications/protective-marking/

That application does a little more than just put stuff into the subject line, it also has auditing functionality - so I presume somewhere behind the scenes all of the emails you are sending are getting tracked/audited against their classifications.  So us just putting in a drop down box to let you mark the messages in the subject field is not likely to satisfy your compliance team/people. Perhaps you could confirm this?

We could implement such a capability, what I don't know though is what is behind the scenes in terms of the other functionality. 

Gerry

 

 

 

[samwoo]

On ‎22‎/‎02‎/‎2017 at 0:27 PM, Gerry said:

@samwoo

Thanks for the response. OK that makes more sense now.  Yes I can see from the screen shot this is a separate application/plugin for Outlook.  http://www.360-systems.com/applications/protective-marking/

That application does a little more than just put stuff into the subject line, it also has auditing functionality - so I presume somewhere behind the scenes all of the emails you are sending are getting tracked/audited against their classifications.  So us just putting in a drop down box to let you mark the messages in the subject field is not likely to satisfy your compliance team/people. Perhaps you could confirm this?

We could implement such a capability, what I don't know though is what is behind the scenes in terms of the other functionality. 

Gerry

Hi @Gerry,

Just found out a bit more information about how the Protective Marking works on our end.

There is an add-in which is installed locally on each machine for use within Outlook. When sending a new email, all it does is append the chosen marking to the end of the subject line.

When you are replying or forwarding an email from within Outlook, if it has a marking of [OFFICIAL] for example and you try to downgrade it to [UNCLASSIFIED], the plugin in Outlook will simply warn you asking if you are sure you want to downgrade the marking.

Everything is done on a client.

With regards to having this functionality on Hornbill, is that we can simply append our required marking to the end of the email sent from within Hornbill. This is enough as the client would do what it needs to do when it arrives into the client inbox.

We would need to be able to set up the marking in a simple list that is editable as markings could change. The ordering of the list dicates the ordering of the markings depending on sensitivity (as you can see from the screenshot i sent above).

______________________________________________________________________

- My Request -

1. Could you implement a feature (that is toggleable for each of your customers) that allows us to append text to the end of the email subject.
2. When writing an email from the Email area or from within a request, there should be a drop down field or a popup that a user would use to select the classification (from a Simple List). If made mandatory, when pressing send, if nothing is chosen then will let the user know that need to choose something to proceed.

______________________________________________________________________

Thanks,

Samuel

[Gerry]

@samwoo

Thanks for the clarification.  I will look into what is possible and see what we can come up with. Its not likely to be in the next 90 days but I will post back as soon as we have something more to tell you. 

Gerry

[samwoo]

9 hours ago, Gerry said:

@samwoo

Thanks for the clarification.  I will look into what is possible and see what we can come up with. Its not likely to be in the next 90 days but I will post back as soon as we have something more to tell you. 

Gerry

Hi @Gerry,

Brilliant thank you. At least it will be in discussion and thought about, so I can relay to relevant colleagues that this is a possibility if approved in your discussions.

Will look out for a response.

Thanks,

Samuel