Anyone reading this blog knows that you can use email to communicate with other people who are online. But did you know that you can also use email to communicate with OnePlace? It's true, and it's easy to do. You can send email to OnePlace to create things like tasks, notes, inbasket messages and team pulses. You can also send email to OnePlace to post messages in a discussion, and to reply to a comment made by someone else about a particular project, file or task. Here's the skinny on what you need to do to take advantage of this cool feature of OnePlace:

Allow Incoming Email
By default, OnePlace won't allow you (or anyone else) to create information in your account via email until you've given it permission to do so. This is done for security purposes. To enable incoming email for your account, edit your personal preferences (under Settings | Personal Account Settings) and check the "Allow Incoming Email" check box.

Email a Task, Note, Inbasket Message or Team Pulse to OnePlace
To create data in your account via email, you first have to know the email address for OnePlace that you send your email to. There are two different types of email addresses you can use, and each serves a specific purpose.

The first type is a set of general email addresses, meaning they are the same for everyone.

• task@app.oneplacehome.com
• note@app.oneplacehome.com
• inbasket@app.oneplacehome.com
• pulse@app.oneplacehome.com

These email addresses are fairly easy to remember, but if everyone uses the same email addresses, how does OnePlace know which person's account to put the information in? It knows by looking at the email address of the person who sent the email. This email address must be the email address of a valid OnePlace user. This means that if you want to use the general email addresses, you'll need to send your email from the same email account (i.e. address) that you use to sign into OnePlace. Since you (hopefully) are the only person able to send email from your email account, this ensures that no one else but you can do this.

But what if you want to allow others to send email to OnePlace on your behalf, such an assistant or a secretary? Don't worry, OnePlace supports that too, using a second type of email address that is specific to you. When you modified your personal preferences to allow for incoming email, OnePlace gave you a special code that is unique to you, which you can use to personalize the general email addresses shown above. If you go back and look at your personal preferences, you'll see the code displayed in the Email section of your preferences. Suppose your email code is something like EfCXTYfU. Your personal email addresses for sending information to OnePlace would be:

• EfCXTYfU_task@app.oneplacehome.com
• EfCXTYfU_note@app.oneplacehome.com
• EfCXTYfU_inbasket@app.oneplacehome.com
• EfCXTYfU_pulse@app.oneplacehome.com

These email addresses work just as well as the general ones, but have the added benefit that they can be sent from any email account, by anyone. This allows you to give your personal OnePlace email addresses to someone else, so make sure you only give them to people you trust.

If you find that you like the added flexibility that the personal OnePlace email addresses give you, one tip for making it easier to use them is to create aliases for them in your email client. Then simply enter one of the aliases in the "To" field of your email, rather than having to remember what your personal email address is.

Reply to Discussions and Comments via Email
If you are an occasional user of OnePlace or don't leave it running in your browser throughout the day, you'll definitely appreciate this feature. You can tell OnePlace to send new messages posted to discussions or as comments on projects, files and tasks to you in email, so that you can read them and reply if you want. This way your teammates can be chatting away inside OnePlace, and provided you check email, you'll be sure not to miss a word of what was said.

To have new discussion messages sent to your email, you need to enable this feature by checking the "Send new discussion messages to my email" checkbox in the "Discussions" section of your personal preferences. Likewise, to receive new comments posted to projects, files and tasks via email, set your "Receive system notifications via my" personal preference (under the General section) to either "Inbasket and Email" or "Email". Then when you receive an email from OnePlace alerting you to a new discussion or comment message, simply use the Reply feature of email to respond to the message. Make sure you enter your reply at the top of the email, above the the "^^^ REPLY ABOVE THIS LINE ^^^" text that OnePlace added to the email it sent you.

There is certainly a lot more to talk about regarding the email integration capabilities of OnePlace, so if you are curious to learn more, please visit the Email Integration section of the online OnePlace Help. Understanding how to use email to get information into OnePlace and organize it properly is a great way to help boost your productivity and efficiency in the office.