E-mail Forms

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’m getting fairly tired of trouping around looking for various forms at my current employment, and I’m betting I’m not the only one–either here or anywhere else. Part of the hassle is tracking down the people to put their signatures or comments on the blame things. “Why can’t we be doing this via E-mail?” I keep asking myself, and just getting more frustrated when I have to go through the antiquated process yet again.

I’m not talking about attaching a document to E-mail. I’m talking about an actual E-mail template which goes from the originator, to the first person in the supervisory chain, then to the next, etc. At each step, the human just needs to click the appropriate check boxes and then sends it to the next person up the chain. The form/template will already have the appropriate routing on it so the poor sod starting at the bottom of the chain doesn’t have to guess what to do. Also, this makes things easier: “Error. You did not complete Box C”, for example.

I swear I saw something like that 20 freaking years ago. Am I imagining that such a thing already exists in reality? If it does, then how is it implemented? And, of course, can such a program be implemented for free?

2

Not via email (at least, not mainly) but what you’re looking for us usually referred to as “workflow and routing”.

I don’t know of any free systems for it offhand (all of the ones we use currently are a part of a larger product) but there is likely something out there.

3

Yeah, you can set up forms in emails in the sense of boxes and tables that people have to fill in.

If you want to enforce whether or what they type in there, and what happens after they do, you need a system of some sort to manage it.
There are any number of solutions out there to do that (or with the capacity to be developed to do that), within a range of overlapping categories, including:

Workflow Management / Business Process Management engines - e.g. ProcessMaker
CRM systems
Service Desk / Ticketing systems
General-purpose collaboration systems - e.g. SharePoint