What is the intended use for cross-site email management?

Environment:

August 2014 and newer releases, Cross-site email management

Resolution:

This implementation is meant to support two businesses, B-to-B, that use the Oracle B2C Service product.  The intention is not to support the transfer of an incident from one site to another.

Note: Both sites need to be running the August 2014+ version of Oracle B2C Service for cross-site email management to work.

For this functionality to work, the originating email must come from a Oracle B2C Service instance and that email needs to land in a mailbox that is popped by the techmail utility in another Oracle B2C Service instance.

Use case:

We have customers who use the product to track issues that they have logged as service requests with other companies.  For instance, I run a global fashion company and need my shipments arriving on time to meet my distributor’s needs.  I get a call saying the shipment didn't come in so I use my Oracle B2C Service instance to create a ticket saying ‘what happened to the shipment?’.  It is a bit odd because generally you would be going to the distributor’s site to log that ticket.  However, the customer wants the full history of this interaction so they are using Oracle B2C Service for outgoing incidents.  In this case, the email address associated with this incident is going to be something like fastshipping_customer_service@custhelp.com.  They create the incident and then send a response, when that email goes to that custhelp address, it just so happens that the shipping company also uses the Oracle B2C Service product.  So, it will create an incident in that instance of Oracle B2C Service and the ‘contact’ will be the mailbox of the first Oracle B2C Service site.  At this point, when the shipping company sends a response, techmail on the fashion site will realize that the email came from a separate Oracle B2C Service instance.  In the past, we would have always created a new incident on every subsequent response.  Now, there is a handshake between the two systems that keeps track of the separate reference numbers so the conversation remains in a single incident on both sites.

This exchange between two Oracle B2C Service sites is considered a conversation and so each thread will contain the entire contents of every email exchange.