1. Product overview

Messaging Management turns Dolibarr into a centralised professional communication platform. Instead of scattering business correspondence across personal mail clients, shared spreadsheets and a separate chat tool, the module brings e-mail, internal messaging, team channels and departmental shared inboxes into the ERP itself — next to the third parties, quotations, orders, invoices and projects the conversations are actually about.

The result is a single, auditable record of who said what to whom, when, about which business object, and how quickly the organisation responded.

2. Business objectives

·       Eliminate the loss of context between an e-mail thread and the ERP record it concerns.

·       Make departmental mailboxes accountable: every conversation has an owner, a status and a deadline.

·       Measure responsiveness objectively through first-reply time, resolution time and SLA compliance.

·       Reduce manual routing through an automation rule engine.

·       Provide a defensible audit trail for regulated and contractual correspondence.

·       Keep communication data inside the organisation's own database, under its own retention policy.

3. Target users

Department	Primary use
Management	Cross-department visibility, SLA and workload dashboards
Sales	Quotation follow-up, customer threads linked to the opportunity
Customer service	Shared support inbox, assignment, SLA, escalation
Accounting	Invoice reminders, payment disputes, document requests
Purchasing	Supplier negotiation threads linked to purchase orders
Logistics	Shipment notifications, delivery complaints
Human resources	Confidential internal exchanges, onboarding channels
Project teams	Per-project channels with decisions and shared files
IT and quality	Audit trail, retention policy, GDPR operations

 

4. Key benefits

·       One inbox for the whole organisation, filtered by permission rather than by mailbox password sharing.

·       Every conversation carries a status, a priority, an owner and an SLA deadline.

·       Automatic linking of a thread to the third party, quotation, order, invoice or project it concerns.

·       Rule-driven routing removes the daily manual triage of a shared mailbox.

·       Real measurement replaces impressions: first-reply time, resolution time, SLA compliance, reopen rate.

·       A message becomes a task, a ticket or an agenda event in one click, with its context preserved.

·       Full audit trail and configurable retention, with archiving that never silently deletes.

·       Five languages, so a multinational team uses one system in its own words.

 

5. Technical architecture

The module is a standard Dolibarr external module. It modifies no core file, so a Dolibarr upgrade does not break it. It installs into htdocs/custom/ and registers itself through the ordinary module descriptor contract.

Item	Value
Technical name	messagingmanagement
Module class	modMessagingManagement
Module number	1316000
Table prefix	llx_messagingmanagement_
Business tables	35
Permissions	38
Menu entries	28
Scheduled tasks	11
Languages	5 (781 keys each)
Minimum PHP	8.1
Databases	MySQL, MariaDB

 

The 35 business objects share one generic list engine and one generic card engine, so filtering, pagination, column selection and permission checks behave identically everywhere and evolve in one place.

6. Communication dashboard

The Communication Command Center is organised in three zones plus analytical components.

·       Zone 1 — Communication pulse: messages received and sent today, unread, priority, assigned, unassigned, awaiting reply, active internal conversations.

·       Zone 2 — Activity centre: open and closed conversations, active channels and groups, unread mentions, drafts, scheduled messages, tasks created from messages, recent conversations and active shared inboxes.

·       Zone 3 — Alerts and performance: unanswered messages, breached deadlines, send failures, IMAP and SMTP errors, blocked and suspicious attachments, overloaded queues, unassigned conversations, plus SLA, reply-rate and read-rate gauges.

·       Six interactive charts: daily inbound and outbound flow, conversations by status, messages per mailbox, priority breakdown, monthly SLA compliance, monthly average reply time.

·       Communication heatmap by weekday and hour, revealing genuine peak load.

·       Conversation Radar: open conversations ranked by a composite risk score built from priority, remaining SLA time, assignment state and thread volume.

7. Internal messaging

·       Private one-to-one conversations between Dolibarr users.

·       Group conversations with owner, administrators, members and roles.

·       Reply, forward, quote, edit within a configurable window, delete by permission.

·       Mark unread, mark important, pin, archive, mute.

·       Mentions with their own notification path and unread tracking.

·       Reactions on any message.

·       Attachments, drafts and scheduled sending on internal messages too.

·       Read receipts, configurable per instance.

8. Private conversations

Private conversations are not visible to non-participants. A dedicated privateaudit permission exists for legally authorised inspection; granting it is an explicit and auditable act rather than an administrator side effect.

9. Group conversations

·       Name, description, picture, owner, administrators and members.

·       Types: private, visible, temporary, project-related, customer-related, department-related.

·       Temporary groups carry an expiry date.

·       Invitations, removal, role changes, per-member muting.

·       Pinned messages and shared files.

10. Team channels

Eleven channel types cover the usual organisational structure.

Type	Typical use
public / private	Company-wide or restricted discussion
team	A standing team's working channel
project	Created alongside a Dolibarr project
customer / supplier	Dedicated to one third party
support / sales	Front-office coordination
accounting / logistics / HR	Back-office coordination

 

·       Visibility: open, restricted, confidential.

·       Owner, moderators, members with notification levels (all, mentions, none).

·       Join, leave, invite, restrict, archive, reactivate, close, export.

·       Activity counters and last-activity tracking.

 

11. Email management

·       Receive, send, reply, reply all, forward, Cc, Bcc.

·       Drafts, scheduled sending, cancellation of a scheduled send.

·       Priority, signature and template insertion, attachments.

·       Classify, assign, follow, archive, delete, restore, search.

·       Per-recipient delivery status and read timestamp.

·       Message list showing sender, recipients, subject, date, size, attachments, status, priority, labels, assignment and linked ERP objects.

12. Shared inboxes

A shared inbox is a departmental queue with its own members, supervisors, SLA and workload. The cockpit shows, per queue: open conversations, unassigned backlog, breached deadlines, unread count, member count, average first-reply time and an SLA compliance bar. A queue above its load threshold is flagged visually, and a mailbox in IMAP or SMTP error is flagged in red.

Conversation statuses: new, unassigned, assigned, in progress, waiting for customer, waiting internally, resolved, closed, archived.

13. IMAP synchronisation

·       Periodic and manual retrieval, folder management, UID tracking.

·       Duplicate protection on (mailbox, UID): re-running never doubles a message.

·       MIME header decoding and charset conversion to UTF-8.

·       Thread resolution by In-Reply-To, then by normalised subject on the same mailbox.

·       Automatic resolution of the sender address onto a Dolibarr third party.

·       Batch limiting so a large mailbox degrades into several runs instead of a timeout.

·       Error handling that flags the mailbox and writes an audit row without ever logging a secret.

·       Degraded mode when the PHP imap extension is absent: everything else keeps working.

14. SMTP delivery

·       Immediate and deferred sending through Dolibarr's own mail transport.

·       Delivery queue with retry accounting and a configurable retry ceiling.

·       Hourly rate limiting per mailbox to stay within provider limits.

·       Statuses: draft, scheduled, queued, sent, failed, cancelled, to retry.

·       Failures surface on the dashboard rather than disappearing into a log.

15. Templates

Eleven categories ship with the module: sales e-mail, quotation follow-up, order confirmation, invoice reminder, shipping notification, document request, support reply, invitation, reminder, internal message and automatic reply. Each template carries a language, subject, HTML and text bodies, variables, an attached signature, visibility and a usage counter.

Available variables include contact name, user, company, quotation, order and invoice references, amount and date.

16. Signatures

Signatures are scoped: personal, per mailbox, per department, per language, per message type, per entity or global. Each carries job title, phone, e-mail, website, logo, legal notice and both HTML and plain-text bodies.

17. Attachments

·       Size limit and extension deny-list enforced by configuration.

·       MIME type and extension both recorded; a mismatch is a review signal.

·       MD5 checksum for integrity and duplicate detection.

·       Scan status: accepted, rejected, pending, suspicious — ready for an external antivirus connector.

·       Rejected and suspicious files surface on the dashboard instead of being dropped silently.

·       Per-file download counting and storage accounting by type.

18. Assignments

A conversation can be assigned to a user, a group, a team, a department or a queue, manually, automatically, by load balancing or by self pick-up. The module keeps the full assignment history: who assigned, from whom, why, when it was accepted and when it was released.

19. Internal notes

An internal note is attached to an external conversation but is never sent to the customer. It is visually distinct, can mention a colleague, can carry an attachment and appears in the audit trail.

20. Tags and priorities

Ten label categories ship by default: urgent, sales, support, billing, order, complaint, supplier, project, dispute and VIP. Labels carry colours, can be private or shared, and are applied manually or by rule.

Five priority levels — low, normal, high, urgent, critical — drive the SLA policy and the Conversation Radar risk score.

 

21. Automation rules

A rule combines a trigger, criteria and actions, with an execution order and an optional stop-processing flag.

Criteria	Actions
from, to, from_domain	set priority
subject_contains, body_contains	apply label
has_attachment, size_gt	archive
priority	assign to team
outside_business_hours	assign to user

 

An unknown criterion is ignored rather than treated as a match, so a typo can never make a rule fire on everything. Every evaluation is logged with its result, duration and error.

22. Automatic replies

Seven reply types: out of office, acknowledgement of receipt, case opening, request confirmation, closing hours, deadline exceeded and status change. Each has a period, applicable days, hours, language, template, a maximum per sender, an anti-loop cooldown and an exclusion list — so two responders can never loop against each other.

23. Scheduled messages

Choose a date and time, edit or cancel before it leaves, duplicate it, watch the queue and its status, and be notified on failure. Delivery is performed by a Dolibarr scheduled task.

24. Search

Full-text search combined with filters on sender, recipient, subject, content, date range, mailbox, priority, direction, status, label, attachment presence and file name. Searches can be saved, marked favourite and shared.

25. Archiving and retention

A configurable retention window drives an archiving task. Archiving never deletes: erasure remains an explicit, permissioned operation. Per-mailbox retention overrides the global default. Deactivating the module does not delete any data.

26. Dolibarr integrations

Object	Integration
Third party	Messagerie tab, conversations, exchange statistics
Contact	Exchange history, address completion
Quotation	Thread linked to the quotation, follow-up, reminders
Sales order	Confirmation, clarification, complaint handling
Purchase order	Supplier requests and confirmations
Invoice	Sending, reminders, payment disputes, proof of exchange
Shipment	Notification, tracking, delivery complaints
Contract	Renewal reminders, contractual correspondence
Project and task	Project channel, message converted into a task
Ticket	Message converted into a ticket, replies attached
Agenda	Events and follow-up reminders created from a message
DMS	Attachment archiving and permissions
Users and groups	Native accounts, groups and permissions reused

 

27. REST API

An authenticated REST API exposes mailboxes, conversations, messages, channels, attachments, search, aggregated KPI, assignment, status change and mailbox synchronisation. Credentials are never returned. Sort fields are whitelisted against the real table columns. Write routes append an audit row.

28. Webhooks

Outgoing webhooks are disabled by default. Each payload is signed with HMAC-SHA256 so the receiver can authenticate it, each call is bounded by a timeout and fully logged, and ten consecutive failures deactivate the webhook automatically.

29. Reporting

·       Volume: received, sent, internal, total and conversations per mailbox.

·       Performance: average first-reply and resolution time, SLA compliance, open and closed conversations.

·       Quality: unanswered, overdue, reopened, send failures, unassigned.

·       Sales: conversations, message volume and responsiveness per customer.

·       Support: distribution by status with delays and derived tasks.

·       Storage: attachment count, total and average size and rejections by file type.

·       Period filters, twelve-month trend chart, CSV and JSON export.

30. Security

·       Permission check on every page and every action.

·       CSRF protection through the Dolibarr token mechanism.

·       Parameterised and escaped SQL; whitelisted sort fields.

·       Escaped output; inbound message bodies rendered inert.

·       Encrypted credential storage, never redisplayed, never logged.

·       Attachment size, extension and MIME controls with checksums.

·       Entity separation on every table and every query.

·       Seventeen audited action types with actor, IP, user agent and severity.

31. GDPR

Export of a contact's communications, permissioned anonymisation and erasure, configurable retention, access restriction and full logging of the operations themselves. A warning precedes any definitive deletion.

32. Multilingual support

French, English, Spanish, Italian and German, 781 keys each, all authored explicitly. There is no English fallback: a missing translation is a build error, not a silently English screen.

33. Demonstration data

A dedicated configuration tab populates and clears a complete twelve-month dataset covering every workflow state, so the module can be evaluated immediately. Every generated row is tagged, and the purge acts only on those tags — real data is never touched.

34. Technical requirements

Component	Requirement
Dolibarr	19.x and above
PHP	8.1 and above
Database	MySQL 5.7+ or MariaDB 10.3+
Required extensions	mysqli, mbstring, json
Optional extensions	imap (mailbox retrieval), curl (webhooks)
Dolibarr modules	Third parties enabled

 

35. Publisher

Developed by DoliResources

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Website: www.doliresources.com