Mail Forms are a feature that have been available in SAP CRM since at least CRM 4.0. Useful in both the Interaction Center and the Marketing Professional business roles, Mail Forms allow you to create re-usable templates for emails (as well as letter, fax, or SMS) communications. Mail Forms can be used to facilitate communication with business partners on a mass scale, as in the case of outbound Marketing e-mail campaigns. However Mail Forms can also be used to facilitate one-to-one email communications between contact center agents and customers in the Interaction Center.
One of reasons that Mail Forms are so useful is that in addition to using standard HTML text and images, you can also include dynamic variables using any CRM-related content/fields so that the variables are replaced with specific content relevant to each e-mail recipient and/or contact center agent (i.e., customer name, customer marketing attributes, agent signature, etc.).
However, one of the long-standing complaints about Mail Forms was that SAP did not offer any easy means to transport Mail Forms between CRM systems and clients, meaning that you had to manually re-create all of your Mail Forms in every system (e.g., Dev, QM/Test, Production).
With Enhancement Package 1 (EHP1) for SAP CRM 7.0 this issue has been resolved. Users can now easily select and transport Mail Forms from one system or client to another. This can be done either via SAP GUI (program CRM_PML_MAIL_FORM_TRANSPORT) or in the CRM WebClient via the Mail Form search screen.
SAP GUI report CRM_PML_MAIL_FORM_TRANSPORT
The report CRM_PML_MAIL_FORM_TRANSPORT, accessible from transaction SE38, enables the transport of a mail form from the current (source) system to another (target) system. Before the actual transport is performed, consistency checks run whether the settings related to the personalized mails functionality in the source and target systems correspond to each other. Otherwise, the mail form designed in the source system may not be used correctly in the target system. Technically, this is realized via a call to an RFC function module in the target system, that creates the mail form in the target system based on a serialized version of the mail form that is transferred via the network connection. An appropriate RFC connection between the source and the target system has to be available. RFC connections are maintained using transaction SM59.
CRM WebClient -- IC Manager or Marketing Professional Business Roles
Using the CRM WebClient you can access the Mail Form search screen from either the IC Manager or the Marketing Professional business role. One you search for and select the desired Mail Form you will see a new button labeled "Transport" that allows you to select the desired RFC destination.
Notes and Restrictions
Please note that in either case, via SAP GUI or via the CRM WebClient, it is only possible to select and transport one Mail Form at a time. I am not aware of an easy means to do a mass select and transport. I suppose you could try to use LSMW to create it in batch mode, but this is not officially supported by SAP.
Also, please note that this functionality is only available with CRM 7.0 EHP1 and above. Users with early systems, such as CRM 2007 could potentially copy the code for the class and method and manually down port into their system, but obviously this is also not officially supported by SAP. See this BPX discussion thread for the source code.
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