Mail to Members for Sessions

This feature request is a part of the Calendar Revision II.

1 Initial Problem

If you want to address all session participants at once and send them an e-mail, you have to select them "individually", i. e. they are listed as individual recipient addresses.

This can cause many session participants to classify the email as spam because many individual email addresses are listed. Further the interaction necessary to write emails to participants should be streamlined with other modules.

2 Conceptual Summary

A "Mail to Members" (or "Mail to Participants") functionality can solve this problem and would mean that sending e-mails to all members of a course, group or session would work the same way. Mail Templates are made available in this function as well. Placeholders should be SESS_TITLE, SESS_LOCATION, SESS_DETAILS.

Note: In FR:  Extend Session Participants List with Member Gallery, we propose to also extend this functionality to the members gallery.

3 User Interface Modifications

3.1 List of Affected Views

• Session > Edit Participants
• Related: Session > Edit Participants > Member Gallery (not suggested in this FR, see: Extend Session Participants List with Member Gallery) 
• Administration > Mail > Mail Templates

3.2 User Interface Details

We propose to use the same pattern as currently used in courses and groups for sending mails to members (here participants):

Also the next screens would work after the same pattern, allowing to mail selected participants or participants of a specific role in the surounding object.

After clicking on mail to members

3.3 New User Interface Concepts

No new UI-Concepts.

4 Technical Information

5 Contact

• Author of the Request: Seiler, Yvonne [yvseiler], Amstutz, Timon [amstutz], Universität Bern
• Maintainer: {Please add your name before applying for an initial workshop or a Jour Fixe meeting.}
• Implementation of the feature is done by: {The maintainer must add the name of the implementing developer.}

6 Funding

If you are interest in funding this feature, please add your name and institution to this list.

• Universität Bern

7 Discussion

Kunkel, Matthias [mkunkel], 23 JUL 2018 : Does this feature take into account that we have a difference between "registered" and "not registered" users in a session? Do we want to support mails to registered users only? Could be a simple additional checkbox. IMHO this would be helpful if you have a bigger group of users that do not have to participate on all sessions (or even can't because sessions are parallel or in different places).

Meyer, Stefan [smeyer], 20 Jul 2018: I support this request. @mkunkel: This feature does only support mail to roles. In the case the session participant role. You can use the session participant table and his table filter for addressing users by other criteria: registered, participated, ...

JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe], 30 JUL 2018 : We highly appreciate this suggestion and schedule it for 5.4. We keep the default behaviour of the mail interface and only support role-based recipients (no support of registered / un-registered users).

8 Implementation

Test Cases

Test cases completed at 2018-10-22 by Tödt, Alexandra [atoedt]

• 24882 : Mail-Textvorlage erstellen
• 24883 : An alle Mitglieder E-Mails verschicken per "Mail an Mitglieder"

Approval

Approved at 23.10.2018 by Amstutz, Timon [amstutz].