Send an email with a link to start a process model

Hi Gavin - off the top of my head:

1. give your User an Appian account and assign them a Task. This user could be of type "infrequent" so it doesn't incur a significant license cost. I am presuming there's some objection(s) to this otherwise you wouldn't be asking this question? If the business "cannot define up-front who they would need to gather the approval from" you could create the account on demand. You must be getting the User's email from somewhere at run-time so you only need in addition their first name and last name to create a Basic User account for them.
2. have the recipient reply to the email (i.e. pre-set the 'from' when sending the email) which would be used to trigger an Appian process model. The tricky bit I guess would be ensuring the process was able to distinguish between an "Approve" and a "Reject" i.e. how to make sure the email content was predictable so the process would be guaranteed to "understand" user's intentions. Maybe the email content could have two different 'mailto' links that would spawn emails that were targeted at different end points (one for 'Approve', one for 'Reject'). Note that you'd need something in the subject or content that would correlate to the work instance that requires Approval or Rejection

Almost certainly there are other ways to skin this cat...let's see what else the community comes up with.

Hi Gavin - off the top of my head:

1. give your User an Appian account and assign them a Task. This user could be of type "infrequent" so it doesn't incur a significant license cost. I am presuming there's some objection(s) to this otherwise you wouldn't be asking this question? If the business "cannot define up-front who they would need to gather the approval from" you could create the account on demand. You must be getting the User's email from somewhere at run-time so you only need in addition their first name and last name to create a Basic User account for them.
2. have the recipient reply to the email (i.e. pre-set the 'from' when sending the email) which would be used to trigger an Appian process model. The tricky bit I guess would be ensuring the process was able to distinguish between an "Approve" and a "Reject" i.e. how to make sure the email content was predictable so the process would be guaranteed to "understand" user's intentions. Maybe the email content could have two different 'mailto' links that would spawn emails that were targeted at different end points (one for 'Approve', one for 'Reject'). Note that you'd need something in the subject or content that would correlate to the work instance that requires Approval or Rejection

Almost certainly there are other ways to skin this cat...let's see what else the community comes up with.

Thanks for the reply Stewart.

1. Yes that could possibly be an option, automatically creating the account when a user wants to assign them a task. The issue at the moment is the need to also set them up in the correct groups to allow them to sign in through SSO as that task currently sits outside of Appian

2. Yes that was my thought too, two mailto links each targeted at a different process model, one for reject and one for approve, with the case reference prepopulated either in the subject or the message body