Partial Email Automation 0r Manual Intervention in an automated process

Question

I've been thrown a bit of a curve by my sales team - they want an email to be automatically sent from an Opportunity that meets specific criteria , not a problem normally I can use workflow/email alert or process flow.

However the curve is they want to be able to select the recipients manually before the email is sent.

What they envision is when an Opportunity is edited and meets the criteria after it is "saved" they want an email window to pop up ( similar to what happens when you click Send An Email button) using an existing template whcih would allow them to select recipients from the Opportunity Contacts.

I have created a Process Flow that specifies the object (Opportunity) when a record is created or edited and I have defined the Criteria for this Action Group, the remaining step is to select an Action to be triggered and this is where I am stuck. I'm thinking there has to be some way to "pop up" the email window - any help, direction or suggestion would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

What you're asking for is impossible. This is because if such a feature did exist, you could potentially end up with a lot of database contention (CANNOT_LOCK_ROW errors) as the system waited for input from the users. How we solve this problem is that we use User lookup fields which are populated, then we can determine the recipient dynamically by using the Related User email option. However, this involves specifying the users before saving, not during or after. That's probably the best solution we have right now. You could use a validation rule to prevent saving when the criteria would be met but no user has been selected yet.