Adding a contact in Autotask from ATES

When the Add Ticket Email Service (ATES) processes an incoming email message it compares the incoming customer information to your Autotask organizations.

  • If ATES identifies an Autotask organization that corresponds to the incoming XML customer information, but cannot find a matching contact in the organization information, and the XML does not include the Contact element, the service does not assign a contact to the ticket.

A message is added to the ticket indicating that no match was found for the contact email address submitted with the alert email.

  • If the incoming XML includes the contact element, the Web Services attempt to add a contact using the incoming Contact element information.

NOTE  The Contact element is not required but strongly recommended for users who want to use Autotask workflow rules to set up a system to notify contacts at ticket creation.

The following is the contact element tag: <Contact name="Firstname Lastname"/>

For an example of an XML token that includes the Contact name tag, refer to Sample message XML.

The content can be parsed from the From: name of the incoming email.

For example, if using a third party email parser to forward alerts to the Service, the following tag can be inserted between the Autotask opening and closing tags in the Plain Text Body field under %msg_body%

                    <Contact name="%msg_fromname"/>

If the XML contains the optional Contact name value, the following occurs:

  • The service attempts to match the Customer name and Email name values to an Autotask organization and contact as outlined in the procedures above.

If a matching organization is found for the customer name value, but no matching contact is found for the organization, the service attempts to create a contact in Autotask.

The following fields are completed based on information parsed from the incoming email: First Name, Last Name, Organization, and Email Address

  • If no value is available for any field, the value is set to unknown.
  • User-Defined Fields, including required fields are ignored, unless a default value was configured.