Announcing AppSheet in Gmail: Dynamic Emails for GA

[Sarmad_Hashmi]

In August, we announced our community preview for AppSheet Dynamic Email in Gmail. Today, we’re happy to share that dynamic emails are now available for GA, which we just announced at Google Cloud Next '21. You can learn more about it in the Google Cloud NEXT breakout session and this how-to video. We’ve also posted a how-to article that gives some additional information about Dynamic Emails and how to create them.

Using Dynamic Email, with just a few clicks you can embed an application view directly into emails and recipients can interact with your application directly in Gmail.

What is a Dynamic Email?

Dynamic emails enable users to interact directly with your app in Gmail rather than clicking out to view the AppSheet app in a separate window. When recipients first open the email, the latest data is queried from your app and displayed to the user. Users can view up-to-date data and make changes right from the email:

The GIF above shows a user viewing an inventory request from an AppSheet application and approving it directly in the email. This is the power of dynamic emails.

How can I configure a dynamic email?

When creating an Email Task in Automation (tutorial), you will see a new dropdown under “Use Dynamic Email”. This dropdown lists the views in your app that are currently supported for dynamic emails. Selecting a view here will embed that view into the email. Once you’ve selected a view, you can also preview it to see what it will look like in an email before you send it out.

When the automation is triggered, recipients will receive an email where they can interact directly with the application:

And that’s it! You can try out this exact Dynamic Email configuration for yourself in the following section.

Sample App

We’ve created a Task Manager app that you can use to test out dynamic emails for yourself. Simply add a task using the “New Task” button at the bottom and you will receive a dynamic email in your inbox where you can directly update the task status.

If you want to see how this Task Manager dynamic email task is created, check out this sample app.

New changes since Preview

Thank you to everyone who provided feedback in the past few weeks—your feedback has been invaluable in helping us build this feature out. Based on feedback we received during the Preview phase, we have added several new changes to the dynamic email feature:

• Date change actions support — Note: for now, only certain data change actions are supported
• Column ordering setting for Form Views
• Show type columns support
• App column type support
• Read-only File column type support
• Default to buttons for enum column type
• Added ability to refresh view without reloading email. Additionally, a warning banner prompting recipients to refresh is shown whenever the view is out of sync.
• Ability to add a custom footer to the bottom of your Dynamic Email

Notes & Known Limitations

• Dynamic emails can only be sent to recipients within your email domain. (Removing this restriction is on our roadmap).
• Recipients of dynamic emails must be granted access to the application
• Recipients that interact with dynamic emails are counted towards your app usage and number of user licenses.
• App views in dynamic emails will only render for recipients using Gmail including web, Android, and iOS. In other email clients, the email will contain a link to the app view (Learn more about dynamic email support in Gmail)
• Only Detail and Form view types are supported
• You can only use this feature if you are using a non-public domain (e.g: @gmail.com, @hotmail.com, etc. cannot use this feature)
• Only certain app, column, and view settings are respected in dynamic emails. Please see the Current limitations with dynamic email section in the help center for the list of unsupported settings and column types.
• Please visit the Help Center article for more information on configuring Dynamic Emails and the full list of limitations

Whether you have been using Dynamic Emails already or you are trying it out for the first time, we’d love to hear about your use cases and experience.

If you have any other feedback, please do share it in this thread as well!

[Koichi_Tsuji]

In my honest opinion, I expected the function to send mail to Google Groups to be supported before the GA release, as the expected users for this feature is largely Google Workspace users who are quite often use Google Groups for auth providers.
As well as this function, the showif/validif constrain could be supported to make this feature to satisfy the practical use cases on the business requirements.

Not supporing REF type column is also give us the restriction to the use of this feature, as we quite often use REF to change the values.

The document could be updated as ENUM based type ref also currently not being supported.

For me, we need to wait until those points are addressed to push the feature onto the production app in my humble opinion, except for the simple dynamic email to call for data changes for other app users

@Takuya_Miyai

[Sarmad_Hashmi]

Thank you for your feedback @tsuji_koichi! We have prioritized these items on our roadmap. We recently added support for Ref type column and will have support for Enum based ref type soon as well.

tsuji_koichi:

As well as this function, the showif/validif constrain could be supported to make this feature to satisfy the practical use cases on the business requirements.

For this one, we do already support valid_if constraints but we’re working on adding show_if support soon.

Thank you again!

[Thilina_Wick]

Hi, to add to @Koichi_Tsuji's point, an ability to use context() will also help increase the adoption of this feature as for most existing applications the only thing preventing me from implementing this is context(view) not working and I have used it in a lot of forms

[Fabian_Weller]

We would immediately start using Dynamic Emails if it would work with Microsoft Domain.

[Mitul_Vanasiwal]

Hi Sarmad Hashmi,

I would like to have more understanding on " * Recipients that interact with dynamic emails are counted towards your app usage and number of user licenses."

We have created Visitor Management system on appsheet and have configured it such that security guards will register visitor details and dynamic email will be sent to employees for approval.

As per my understanding, I will have to procure AppSheets license for all the users in my organization as visitors can be of any user.

We are currently using Google Workspace Basic, Business, and enterprise plus licenses.

I believe procuring AppSheet license just to provide approval on email is not feasible and not the best option.

Please help with the optimum solution.

Thanks
Mitul

[Sarmad_Hashmi]

Fabian:

We would immediately start using Dynamic Emails if it would work with Microsoft Domain.

Unfortunately, there are currently no plans to support AppSheet Dynamic Emails with non-Google domains, apologies for the inconvenience!

Mitul_Vanasiwala:

As per my understanding, I will have to procure AppSheets license for all the users in my organization as visitors can be of any user.

If I understand your use case correctly, you only need to send Dynamic Emails to specfic employees for approval, is that correct? Do security guards use the AppSheet application to register visitors? If that is the case, you will need a license for each approver of the Dynamic Email. For the registration portion, depending on how you want to structure your data (each user is signed up vs. just a separate row in your data source), you could use a public plan.

We will only count a recipient of a Dynamic Email as a user if they actually open the Dynamic Email.

Let me know if that helps clarify!

[Mitul_Vanasiwal]

Hi Samad Hashmi,

Thank you for your response.

All employees will have to approve their respective visitors by email. (Approvals are required not for specific employees but are required for all employees for their respective visitors). We have figured out license requirements for the security guards who will be using AppSheet to register visitors.

Employees will only approve their visitors by (dynamic) email and will not be using the AppSheet application and hence it is not cost-friendly to buy licenses for all employees just to interact on email to provide approval.

Please help with the optimum solution.

[Sarmad_Hashmi]

Hi Mitul,

Using an AppSheet Dynamic Email is is essentially the same as interacting with a view within an AppSheet application through appsheet.com— hence why we have the same requirement for app usage and licenses. Even without Dynamic Emails, you would have to give every employee access to the app to approve visitor requests, and that would count towards your usage. Dynamic Emails simply lets users access the application from their email. So just to summarize, you would have to have a license for every user or switch to a public plan.

Hope that helps!

[Ami]

Lets assume i have 50 employees that their only usage of the app is approving a visit once every few days. They don’t make use of the app regulary but rather the specefic dynamic email. If we could have a quota of usage just like other google services that would be great, instead of purchasing 50 lisences for 500$ a month we would pay dynamicly every month per actual usage.

[Kirk_Masden]

Sarmad_Hashmi:

dynamic emails are now available for GA

What is “GA”?

[Koichi_Tsuji]

en.wikipedia.org

Software release life cycle

A software release life cycle is the sum of the stages of development and maturity for a piece of computer software. Cycles range from its initial development to its eventual release, and include updated versions of the released version to help improve software or fix software bugs still present in the software. Computer users are most likely to be familiar with the beta phase, as software products are sometimes publicly advertised as being beta in order to reduce users' expectations of their ...

General availability (GA)[edit]

Milestones in a product life cycle: general availability (GA), end of life announcement (EOLA), last order date (LOD), and end-of-life (EOL)

General availability ( GA ) is the marketing stage at which all necessary commercialization activities have been completed and a software product is available for purchase, depending, however, on language, region, electronic vs. media availability.[18] Commercialization activities could include security and compliance tests, as well as localization and worldwide availability. The time between RTM and GA can be from a week to months in some cases before a generally available release can be declared because of the time needed to complete all commercialization activities required by GA. At this stage, the software has “gone live”.

In AppSheet terms, The new feature became the part of official features. Beta or preview feature is not against “Support”, but once GA is declared, we user can get the official support for GA-ed features.

[Kirk_Masden]

Thanks!!

[Thilina]

@Sarmad_Hashmi I’ve already tried to implement this into one of our workflows, but the issue is there is some error that prevents the email arriving in the inbox, Who should I direct these concerns to and is there a way to diagnose what caused the issue? Great feature and everyone here is excited to try it out!

Ps: Same domain but even when it’s a different domain the email with the link will not come either.

[Sarmad_Hashmi]

Hi @Thilina, feel free to get in touch with me directly or through the forum.

I just replied to your other post, hopefully we can resolve the issue soon

[cossa]

Hi Sarmad,
Some messages ago there was a conversation about USD $ 500 per month ??? but could you correct me …
The USD 500 x month we mentioned is only possible if you never want to use MySQL, SQL, Postgres, MariaDB, Apigee, external rest api, Open Api, Okta, application life cycle, bug report, team activity, collaboration team, advanced connector, Governance Policy … to say a few …

For any company that works with spreadsheets, I think it is good to start … but if you want to grow in deployments, security, access GCP (paid separately) and extend this tool solving all the real problems of workers and related, it will end up being almost double the cost of workspace and the features of Workspace are excellent and very powerful … I think something is not quite right … Workspace (essential and powerful) + GCP (every day more necessary) + Appsheet (could be the hook to attract more workspace and gcp clients) but this should be a fabulous sandwich, one of those that you don’t mind getting dirty … and you savor it for hours … but the separate ingredients do not have the same flavor and by paying them separately you end up paying even more taxes … or not … I hope I am wrong and if there is someone who understands it differently … please help !! … maybe the Lord who establishes the prices have been too long nated in the cloud …

I appreciate all the comments and help …
Thanks
Cristobal

PS: sorry my English, native Spanish

[Austin]

Did this in any way affect normal emails that are sent out through automations? We had a process where another software would receive an email from appsheet and perform some actions based on that email that suddenly stopped working when receiving the emails from appsheet some time in october. The actions still happen when I send an identical email myself.

[reapacheap]

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@Sarmad_Hashmi wrote:

Show type columns support

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Has this feature been rolled back? Because appsheet support is telling me that show type columns are not supported