Mar
07
AutoIt
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I’m struggling with a bit of work in my day job at the moment, covering for someone who does this particular piece of work every day, whilst she’s on holiday.
The process is:
1. Open an email in particular Outlook account
2. Read two pieces of data
3. Depending on those pieces of data (one of which can only have one of 6 options, the other is a customer name), do the following:
4. Check for the customer name in an Excel spreadsheet, and pull out the names of two employees who manage that acconut
5. If the customer name is not in the Excel, look up the customer name in a web-based tool and then pull two names out.
6. If the name is not in the web-based tool, panic….
7. Then find all other mails with that customer and message, group them all together, forward them en-masse to the named employees, with a specific template to the mail subject and body.
8. Then delete the source mails and do it all over again till the mail box is empty
She does this manually.
Jesus wept.
Time to pull out autoit, a tool idea for this sort of situation. AutoIt, in case you’ve not heard of it before, is a great little tool to write complex automation tasks (you guessed that bit, right?), including fully-fledged desktop GUIs (eg, windows, menus, toolbars, etc), Internet Explorer automation, and a whole bunch of other interesting bits and pieces.
It’s a great tool to have up your sleeve for quick and dirty automation. If you’ve got no programming experience at all, it’s not one you could just start using, but if you know a bit of Visual Basic, PHP, Perl, or just about any other language (probably even JavaScript), you’ll be up and running with AutoIt very quickly.
Unfortunately, I don’t have time to write the script before I stop doing this period of covering the person who’s on holiday, but next time she goes away, I’ll have it all automated.
In the meantime, I’ll just bandage my bleeding fingers.
Of course, this should all be fixed at source in the system which sends out the initial emails, but that’ll take a team of 20 developers, 6 months, and cost of $x0,000 to do….
