Alternative Transmission Methods
Other than simply sharing the link to the reporting webpage, there are some other options for distributing your reports…
Bundles
Bundles are a great way of making your PDF reports available.
Instead of emailing your reports out, you instead create bundles on your server for people to access when they want them. A 'bundle' is a single PDF integrating several reports together that either cover the same topic, or are for the same audience.
Alternate Email Methods
It's getting harder and harder to use SMTP - the original email protocol - to send messages, as many cloud-based solutions are making it increasingly difficult to let devices and computers send messages automatically.
As an alternative to the mailout method (which sends email via SMTP), the ReportList addon also has a push method. This prepares the reports and messages as normal, but rather than using SMTP to send the message, it calls a custom Python script with a file that describes all of the messages that need to be sent.
This allows you to use your own methods of turning those messages into email, such as sending them via Azure Communication Services.
Publishing
Not everyone wants to use email to send out reports - particularly if you're not creating PDF files.
There are a number of methods that might integrate better with your workflow, such as…
- Uploading to Teams
- Sharing in Sharepoint
- Sending to Slack
The publish method can be used to deploy your reports however you like - pushing them to Sharepoint, printing them out automatically, opening them on remote machines or simply uploading them to an FTP site.
Like the mailout and push methods, the function prepares each of the reports that need to be sent out. However, it doesn't need anybody to be subscribed to bundles and it doesn't prepare any email messages. Once the reports are ready, it simply calls a custom Python script, providing a list of the files it needs to publish.
The script can then do whatever it wants with the content, such as Sending Reports to Sharepoint or Publishing Reports to Discord.