Comments
Comments can be added to records throughout ZeeBORN - a risk assessment, an audit finding, a purchase order, a bunker report and many more. They are the usual way to note something on a record without changing the record itself.
Adding a comment
- Open the record you want to comment on.
- Click Add Comment in the ribbon or action bar of that record.
- Type your text.
- Click Save.
The comment is stored with the record, together with your user name and the date.
Comments do not depend on the status of the record
Add Comment and Add Reminder stay available even when a record is closed, inactive or version-controlled, so a follow-up note can still be attached to a finished record. Who is allowed to comment does not change - the permission checks are the same as before, and the record itself is not touched; only the comment is added.
Sending a comment as a mail notification
When you add a comment, ZeeBORN can prepare an Outlook mail about it at the same time, so the person who needs to know is informed without you writing a separate mail.
- Open the record and click Add Comment.
- Type your comment as usual.
- Tick the Send Mail checkbox and pick a recipient from the list next to it.
- Click Save.
The comment is stored, and an Outlook draft opens, already filled in. Review it, adjust the recipients if needed, and send it from Outlook.
No mail is ever sent automatically. Every draft has to be reviewed and sent by you - this is deliberate; ZeeBORN does not send mail on your behalf silently. If you do not want a mail, simply leave the checkbox unticked and the comment is saved on its own.
The draft contains the module, the record and the ship it belongs to, the comment text itself with its line breaks preserved, and - for reminders - the due date and the responsible user.
The buttons in the notification mail
The mail ends with action buttons so the recipient can react immediately instead of having to search for the record first:
The web portal is the way to go for recipients who are travelling or who do not work with ZeeBORN themselves.
Both buttons have to be set up once
The settings live in the Site Manager configuration: in Site Management, click Configuration in the toolbar, then open Sites/Ships → Site Management - Configuration general.
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Allow sending mails from comments switches the comment mails on. Without it there is no Send Mail checkbox.
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Comment Reply Portal URL holds the address of your web portal. If no address is entered, the mail offers only Open in ZeeBORN and the portal button is left out.
Choosing the recipient
The address field cannot be typed into
It is a selection list, not an input field. Only addresses that are already stored in ZeeBORN can be picked - a one-off address cannot be entered here. An empty list therefore does not mean the field is broken; it means no address has been stored for this ship yet.
If a mail has to go to somebody who is not in the list, send the comment to yourself and forward it from Outlook.
Where the addresses come from depends on where you work, and the two places are different:
In the office
The list shows the business e-mail addresses assigned to the ship or site of the record. In most cases that is the bridge address or a general ship address.
If the list is empty, no such address is stored for that ship yet.
Simply send the addresses to us
You do not have to set this up yourself. Send us the addresses you would like to use - one per ship, or a single general address - and we will enter them for you. They then appear in the list and the comment can be sent.
On board
On board the list is built the other way round: it shows the people who are responsible for that ship, and takes the address from their user account - not from a contact. The list is sorted by role, so the master and the officers appear first.
Two things have to be in place, and a missing address is always one of them:
1. The person has to be assigned to the ship as responsible. This is done in Site
Management: select the ship, then PIC > Assign in the toolbar. The same submenu holds
Edit and Remove for changing or clearing an assignment later. Assigning somebody requires a
right of its own - if the menu is not there, the logged-in user does not hold it.
2. That person's user account has to carry an e-mail address. It is entered in User Management on the user's own page, in the E-Mail field. Nothing else has to be set up: when an address is entered there, ZeeBORN creates the matching mail account by itself and links it to the user. A user without an address is skipped in the recipient list even when they are assigned to the ship.
So when somebody is missing from the list on board, check in this order: is the person assigned as responsible for this ship, and does their user account have an address?
Which modules offer the mail notification
The mail notification is available module by module. It currently works in:
In the remaining modules a comment is saved without the mail option - among them Charter Party, Crewing, EU ETS, FuelEU Maritime, Insurance, Office Contacts, Master Contract and stand-alone Task Tracking. If you do not find the Send Mail checkbox in one of those, that is the reason.
A note on the mail subject
For modules with a clear record identifier - Purchase, Audit, Incident, Dry Dock, Risk Assessment and Ship Defect - the subject already contains the record number, for example Comment: RQ VIT-26-044-E - Fuel Valve Nozzle Assembly. For the lighter modules - Bunker, Drugs & Alcohol, Landing, Off-Hire and Stevedore - the subject is a generic module label. If you have several open records of the same type, it is worth adding an identifier to the subject by hand before sending.
Reminders
Reminders work the same way and offer the same mail notification. They are described under Reminder.