Creating Managemate Activities from Service Request Notifications

Condominium managers and boards may receive service requests through community website portals, including from residents and owners of their condos. To help management teams and board directors track this work in Managemate, Managemate can create and update activities based on the email notifications received for a condo.

When enabled for a condo's Managemate Workspace account, the condo's community website portal can be configured to send service request notification emails to a condo-specific Managemate email address. Managemate then reads the notification and either:

This helps managers and boards keep their Managemate activity list and management reports current, while still allowing residents and owners to submit service requests through their community website portals.

Each participating condo Managemate Workspace is assigned a unique Managemate email address for service request notifications.

For example: [email protected]

The administrator of the condo adds this address to the applicable community website portal account so that Managemate receives service request notification emails for that condo.

When Managemate receives a service request notification, it attempts to identify:

When Managemate receives an email notification with a new service request, and the request identifier does not already exist in Managemate, Managemate creates a new activity.

The new activity is created with the following details:

When Managemate receives an email notification for a new comment or update to a service request, it uses the service request identifier to find the matching Managemate activity.

If a matching activity is found, Managemate adds a new status update to that activity.

The update is indicated as having been created by the Managemate System Admin, because it was created automatically from an email notification.

If the matching Managemate activity cannot be found — for example, because it was deleted — Managemate will create a new activity so the update is not lost.

Users can choose whether to receive an email notification from Managemate when an activity is created or updated from a supported service request email notification. By default, this notification is turned on for managers and turned off for other users, including directors.

If Managemate notifications are enabled, the administrator of the condo's community website portal may want to turn off duplicate notifications sent to the users of the community website portal, so they don't receive two emails for the same service request event.

This feature is intentionally lightweight. Managemate does not currently:

Users will still need to update their community website portals manually, including when work is completed in Managemate.

Attachments added by users into service requests are not automatically saved to Managemate through this email notification process.

If a photo, document, or other attachment needs to be stored in Managemate, the user should upload it directly to the relevant Managemate activity, or forward/send it in a way supported by Managemate.

Where possible, Managemate includes a link back to the original community portal website service request. This allows the user to open the original item in the community portal website if they need to review the source request, respond to the resident or owner, check attachments, or complete an action that must still be done there.

If a Managemate activity originating from a service request email notification is deleted, future email notifications may no longer find the original activity.

In that case, Managemate will create a new activity from the new notification, so the update is not missed.

Managers and boards should avoid deleting activities originating from a service request email notification unless they are sure the activity is no longer needed.

Managemate does not currently delete or mark activities completed automatically when a request is closed or deleted in the community website portal.

If the community website portal email notification indicates that a request has been closed, Managemate endeavors to add that information as a status update. A user should then manually complete or update the related Managemate activity if appropriate.

If a request is deleted in the community portal website, the Managemate user should manually move the related Managemate activity to the recycle bin if it is no longer needed.

If Managemate cannot process a service request notification email from a supported community website portal, the Managemate team may be notified so the issue can be reviewed.

This can happen if:

Activities and status updates created from email notifications are based on the contents of the email Managemate receives. If a service request is later edited, deleted, or changed in the community website portal, Managemate will only know about that change if the supported community website portal sends an email notification and Managemate can process it.

For that reason, the community website portal remains the source system for the original resident-submitted service request, while Managemate helps management company and board users track the related work, updates, and reporting activity.