Sending Visual KPI Alerts to Microsoft Office 365 • Transpara

You can send Visual KPI alerts via Microsoft Office 365, but you need to configure SMPT emails in IIS to have them delivered from the Visual KPI server to a Office 365 email account.

Note: You must have a Office 365 account with email enabled.

Set Up the SMTP Host in Visual KPI

Open Visual KPI Server Manager.
Navigate to the appropriate instance and find System Service>Visual KPI Alert Server.
Set the SMTP Host to localhost and the SMTP Port to 25.

Create an SMTP Server in IIS Manager

Open the Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 Manager.
Create an SMTP server on the same server as Visual KPI.

On the General tab, click Advanced and make sure that port 25 is set to receive inbound SMTP requests.

On the Access tab, click Authentication and make sure that Anonymous access is allowed for inbound SMTP requests.

On the Access tab, click Connection and add the IP address of the local machine.

On the Access tab, click Relay and add the IP address of the local machine.

On the Delivery tab, click Outbound Security and add the Microsoft Office 365 account username and password that you wish to use for sending alerts.

On the Delivery tab, click Outbound connections and set the TCP port to 587.

On the Delivery tab, click Advanced and add smpt.office365.com as the Smart host.

Configure Log Level and Test Alert

Open Visual KPI Server Manager.
Set the Log Level to Full and Test Alert to True. This will create a test alert that will be sent to the website administrator.

Learn more about adding website administrators and contacts in Visual KPI Designer.

Learn more about how to Configure Log Level Settings for Visual KPI Instances.

Learn more about how to Configure Visual KPI Alert Server.

This completes the configuration and the website administrator should get a test alert in about a minute. Once tested, ensure that Log Level is reset to Errors Only and Test Alert is reset to False.

Troubleshooting

Make sure the Log Level is set to Full.

In the Windows Event Viewer, navigate to Applications and Services Logs>Transpara. Look for any messages from the Alert Server that have body text with a message about the reason alert emails failed to send. The image below shows a system that is working correctly.

If you don’t see any errors in the Windows Event Viewer, check the Badmail folder in your local machine’s file system: C:\inetpub\mailroot\Badmail.

If there are many documents in this folder, find the ones with the .BAD extension and open one in Notepad. This file will tell you the reason messages are not being delivered, such as an invalid email address or incorrect routing.