ERMS Implementation Steps
Authors: Vinod Paidakula & Marthi Sarma
Welcome!!! The primary purpose of this document is to share our implementation experience with
SAP Email Response Management System (ERMS). This document does not cover all the Implementation Steps for the ERMS project. Rather, it should be used in conjunction with the detailed implementation steps covered in the below articles:
- https://blogs.sap.com/2015/07/19/finally-an-updated-erms-configuration-guide-for-crm-70/
- https://blogs.sap.com/2015/07/20/erms-configuration-guides-and-documentation/
1. Integration with Outlook
Integration with outlook was performed using the following key steps:
a. Procurement and installation of a new exchange server
- Exchange Server transport rules can only be applied at the email domain level and not at the email address level. Following are the options to address this limitations:
- Option 1: Use a separate Exchange Server for SAP ERMS related routing
- Option 2: Generate a new email sub-domain to use the existing Exchange Server
- In order to avoid creating a separate sub-domain, we configured a new exchange server (Option 1) to ensure emails received at a particular email ID could be routed to SAP
b. Configure transport rule on the new exchange server
- Once the exchange server was configured, we created a transport rule to ensure that all the emails received at the configured email id (Example: CustomerSupportQuestions@outlook.com) will be routed to SAP
c. Transport Layer Security (TLS) Configuration:
- To ensure that the emails are encrypted, TLS needs to be enabled on the Exchange Server.
Below picture provides a high level overview of Outlook – SAP Integration:
2. Additional Integration with SharePoint
To prevent customers from sending their Personal Identifiable Information (PII) or Sensitive Personal Information (SPI), we wanted to ensure that customers can send their queries using a pre-defined template. Usage of pre-defined templates also helps in routing the work to the appropriate workgroup/case worker in SAP.
Below picture provides an overview of the sample page in SharePoint:
Once the above form is submitted in SharePoint by the customer, a PowerShell script loads the data and sends an email to the exchange server with the following details:
- From Email ID: Customer Email Address
- To Email ID: (Example: CustomerSupportQuestions@outlook.com)
- Subject: Email Subject
- Description: Email Description
We scheduled the PowerShell script to run every 5 minutes. Emails received at the configured email id (Example: ‘CustomerSupportQuestions@outlook.com’) are routed to SAP using the steps described in Section 1
3. SAP Enhancements
Over and above the steps mentioned in the ERMS Configuration guide, we created a custom service profile to ensure consistency with other objects in our environment.
a. Create Custom Service Profile
b. Create custom policy
We then created a custom policy to define and execute rules. Below are some key steps in the custom policy:
- Customized the service class ZCL_CRM_ERMS_AH_CREATE_IR to create a custom interaction record. To ensure consistency with other SAP objects in our system, we converted the inbound email into an office document using standard ERMS utilities. The inbound email gets attached to an activity (BUS20000126)
- Once the email is received by SAP, an activity is created and the corresponding inbound email is attached as a document in the ‘Transaction History’ assignment block
- User can then respond to the Inbound email by clicking the ‘Reply/Reply All’ button
- In the email editor, we added an event in the ‘Send button’ to perform the following functions:
- Create the response email as an office document to ensure that the email is shown as an outbound email
- Close the custom Interaction Record/Activity