Automating reply emails in discussion list

Question

I'm trying to create something like a ticketing system but there needs to be some back and forth between creator and person responding. I thought a discussion list would be the best option to display responses in a conversation style instead of append only comments.

However, I also need to be able to send out emails/alerts to the person who created the new discussion and the person responding to it.

Is a workflow on EDIT my only option here? I feel like it would send out too many emails if other columns like status or priority or changed but I only want to send out emails when there's a reply or the disucssion is closed.

Alerts need to be manually set up so they're are kind of useless here unfortunately.

Is there a way that my reply can set the value of the parent. For example as an admin, if I'm replying to an issue, because it's a different content type (message), I can't set the issue as closed in the parent content type (discussion). I don't want to made admins have to go out of their way to identify a disucssion as closed.

Answer 1

With regards to automating emails with regards to replies I have used multiple status indicators to help prevent multiple notifications.

For instance, have a status1 and a status2. status1 is your master status, status2 is specific to a reply. status1 defaults to "submitted". status2 defaults to "pending".

You can then create a workflow where you check for status1="submitted" and status2="pending" and reply field is not null, send email if so with the details you choose and set status2 to "replied". This way any further changes will not trigger this workflow again as they will not meet the conditions for status2="pending".

I don't have an answer for you for automating the closure via email.