Email Notification Options In Timesheet v5.5

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Journyx Timesheet v5.5 provides automatic email notifications that can be used by your organization to streamline the approvals process as well as to remind users who have missed submission deadlines for their time, mileage and expense sheets. This document will describe the various emails that are available within Timesheet and will then discuss the process by which these emails are enabled.

Available Email Notification Options

For information on the reminder emails available for Time/Mileage/Expense Approvals Templates or Project Approvals, please see the Period Approvals or Project Approvals portions of this documentation.

Email Addresses

Timesheet sends any and all email notifications to users based on the email address that has been entered for them in the Extra User Fields portion of the User Maintenance section of Timesheet. If a user does not have an email address associated with him, that user will not receive email from Timesheet regardless of any other settings. Please make sure that every user who will be expecting to receive email notifications has an email address entered in his or her user profile.

Configuring Email Notifications In Timesheet

Email Notifications Via Approval Templates

For information on the reminder emails available for Time/Mileage/Expense Approvals Templates or Project Approvals, please see the Period Approvals or Project Approvals portions of this documentation.

Batch Email Settings

Documentation on the Batch Email Settings of Timesheet can be found in the Approvals Email Settings portion of this documentation.

Email Notifications Via Cron Jobs

Previous versions of Timesheet did not offer Email Notification settings access via the web interface. These older versions provided a simple "Late Timesheet" email via the command line by use of Unix-like cron settings. In all Unix environment installations of Timesheet, the actual crontab file was used to this end. Windows environment installations used a cron-like feature implemented by Journyx, the wtcron.jobs file. While this method of performing automated reminders for late timesheets has not been removed from Timesheet v5.5, this method is very limited and is discussed below primarily for historical reasons.

Windows wtcron.jobs Functionality

The wtcron.jobs file should contain a line that looks like the following:

#13 latelog \python\python.exe \jwt\wtlib\latelog.pyc c:\jtime\jwt\doc\mailmsg admin@yourhost Monday 7

  1. The leading # means that this line is a comment, so Timesheet will ignore this scheduled email reminder. To activate this email reminder, you will need to remove the leading #.
  2. 13 - Indicates the time that the cron email job is processed. Please note that this is in 0-23 hour format. Therefore, the 13 in this example equals 1:00 pm.
  3. latelog - The name that Timesheet uses to refer to this process. This should not be changed.
  4. \python\python.exe - Indicates to Timesheet the location of the installed python modules. This too should never be changed.
  5. \jwt\wtlib\latelog.pyc - Indicates the name of the python file which is to be run to generate the email report. Again, this potion should not be changed.
  6. c:\jtime\jwt\doc\mailmsg - Indicates the location of the file that contains the text that is used to generate the automated emails sent by wtcron.jobs. This file can be edited in any text editor to modify the contents of the automated emails.
  7. admin@yourhost - Indicates the "From" address that will be associated with all email messages sent via the wtcron.jobs process. This parameter can be changed to reflect an appropriate email address for your organization.
  8. Monday - Defines the day of the week that wtcron.jobs will send automated email notifications.
  9. 7 - Defines how many previous days Timesheet will use to determine which users should receive automated wtcron.jobs emails.

Please Note: wtcron.jobs is a Tab Delimited text file. It is critical to the functionality of this file that the tabs separating the columns are not modified when making changes to this file.

After modifying wtcron.jobs is changed, the jtime service must be restarted to activate the changes.

Finally, for wtcron.jobs emails to process, a valid SMTP server name must be entered in the Miscellaneous Options portion of Timesheet's Global Preferences.

Unix cron Functionality

The automated latelog email functionality in Unix is achieved directly via the cron feature of Unix-based operating systems. While all the particulars of configuring this crontab entry are essentially the same as configuring wtcron.jobs for Windows, the unix user should run crontab -e as the user who installed Journyx Timesheet to edit the actual cron entry.

This will automatically open an editor where they can edit a line which looks very similar to the NT line. The actual line in the crontab file should appear similar to the following:

13 13 * * 1 . /u/chris/s/jtest/pi/bin/setup;python /u/chris/s/jtest/pi/apache/wtlib/latelog.pyc /u/chris/s/jtest/doc/mailmsg admin@yourhost Monday 7

The individual components of this crontab entry correspond directly with those discussed above, under the Windows wtcron.jobs section.

mailmsg Contents

The message that is contained in the mailmsg file referenced by both the Windows and unix environment implementations of <cron> functionality is displayed below for reference purposes.

Subject: %Name%: Timesheet Notification

Time Record for: %Name%
Period Beginning: %BeginDate%
Period Ending: %EndDate%

Time has not been entered for the referenced period. Please enter your time as soon as possible.

Thank you.