Mailmerge 200+ users with unique file attachment

[DalekSec]

Morning All,

 

Somehow i've managed to work in IT for 10 years without once looking at Mail merges!

 

HR are wanting to send an email to all staff (200+) with a unique PDF on each. Whats the best way of doing this? We are 365 cloud only

 

Thanks

 

Dalek

[Steve21]

I think the short answer is you don’t without 3rd party addons

 

Mail merge and attachments isn’t normal

 

Steve

[DalekSec]

Thought might be the case, anyone recommend a 3rd party addon? or separate software?

[chaplic]

Setup an account to allow SMTP access in O365, write a bit of powershell to send the email and attachment.

[psydii]

You can certainly do a mail merge to email through Word (start it in word and the mail merge feature takes care of the rest talking to Outlook on your behalf)

 

200 individual emails is well below the harder limits of 365. It probably will throttle a bit, but still be way way quicker than sending them by hand.

 

The "difficult" bit is the per-email PDF. Not sure that there is a built in way, even with Acrobat Pro.

 

 

Perhaps mail merge to pdf first, then a separate mail merge to email to send the links. You could (maybe?) get a bit of VBA to mail merge a cover letter and attach specific pdf using excel as a data source?

[ThomL]

Setup an account to allow SMTP access in O365, write a bit of PowerShell to send the email and attachment.

This is the way I've done this before. Each pdf file had a unique filename, a csv contained the email address & filename combo, then PowerShell parsed the csv - creating and sending an email per line in the csv file, attaching the file in the filename column and sending to the email address in the email column. I also added some other columns so I could make the emails more personal, use individuals names in the email body etc. I'd share the code but I didn't keep it after I used it, sorry!

[DavR]

Depending on how confidential the PDF, you could upload these to web storage somewhere, and include in your data source a column with the unique links in, per recipient.

 

In Word Mail Merge, you'd then pick name, email and link fields from the data source.

[andy_b]

Before Powershell, I used a combo of Excel and Send-It-Quiet Command Line sendmail tool.

 

Got Excel to generate the unique command for each recipient with a bunch of concatenates and then pasted it into a commandline.

 

Powershell is probably the better option though