How To: Migrating Legacy Email Notification to leverage Email Templates on TPP 23.3 and higher

Applies To:

Trust Protection Platform 23.3 and higher

Summary:

Trust Protection Platform 23.3 introduces a new method for managing email notifications. This article discusses how to manually migrate notifications in the legacy format to the new template format.

Bonus Content: Check out the bottom of the article for details on how to move channels between environments through export and import.

More Information:

Before you begin, make sure you review the documentation on working with email templates.  See Email templates.

 

Also review the training course in Venafi Academy on managing email templates.  See Venafi Academy What's New Course.

 

In addition, make sure the scale under Display settings on your screen is 100 percent as 125 could lead to the rules not being displayed properly and the markup button not selecting the text correctly. 

 

Steps for Manual Migration of your custom Email Notifications:

Note: Shipping/default notifications from Venafi have been migrated for you - many of which have been greatly enhanced to meet modern use cases of the majority of Venafi customers

1. Launch "Venafi Configuration Console (VCC)" on your Venafi Server
   
   Pro Tip: Many of the snap-ins available in VCC can be installed remotely on your windows Workstation by installing VenafiMmc-23.3.0.msi and building a custom snap-in view on Microsoft Management Console
   
   
2. Expand Tools Snap-in
   
   
   
3. Expand Logging and Click on Channels
   
   
   
4. In the right pane you should see your notification channels that exist in your main channels container.
   
   
   
5. Click to highlight the channel you want to migrate.  In this example we migrate "Email to Owner - Certificate Ready to Download"
   
   
6. Click on the "HTML" tab to see a preview of what the legacy message looked like
   
   
   
7. Click "Markup" in the top right hand corner of the preview
   
   
   
8. You should now be looking at the raw HTML of your email message
   
   
9. Select all of the HTML using CTRL+A and copy it to your clipboard
   
   
10. Launch Notepad (or your favorite editor) and paste the contents
    
    
    
11. Back in VCC click on the "Edit Message" action in the actions pane on the right hand side
    
    
    
12. Position your screens so you can see both SMTP Message Editor and Notepad side by side
    
    
    
13. Now we are picking the pieces of the notification and copying into the most appropriate section of the email template section.
    
    
14. Look at the top section that has "Notice: Certificate Ready for Download" and copy that into the Title section of the Email Message Editor
    
    
    
15. Copy the section, everything including the <P> tags that describes that "The most recent version of the certificate is now available to download" and copy it in to the Description field
    
    Pro Tip: "Toggle Word Wrap" on to make the Edit Message Editor easier to read when working with longer areas of text or HTML.
    
    
    
    
    
16. Copy the link contained in the HREF into the "Login URL". Do not include the beginning or ending double quotes.
    
    
    
    
17. Copy the Link Text "Download the certificate" into the "LoginLabel" field of the SMTP Message Editor.
    
    
    
18. Now we are ready to preview what it looks like by clicking on the "Show Preview" button within the SMTP Message Editor window.  The preview will typically show to the left of the editor.
    
    
    
    
19. You can see what the message looks like rendered in HTML without the macros resolving.
    
    
    
20. Make sure you Save your work.  Next time this notification is used, it will use the updated template instead of the old message.

 

How to move custom notifications between TPP server environments

Now that you have taken the time to migrate and/or create your own notifications, here are the steps you would need to perform to move the configuration from a Development to Production environment:

 

1. Select the notification rule(s) you want to export:

2. Select a target name location for export.  If you have changed the template or icons also select the 'Include templates and images' option:

 

3. Click on the Channels node and select the channel(s) you want to export:

 

4. Enter the same target file name as in step 2:

 

5. You should see the following resulting file structure created:

 

6. Copy these files to the "\program files\venafi\schema\logging" folder on one of the TPP servers in your Production Environment.

 

7.  Use "schematool" to import the Custom logging structure into your Production environment:

"\program files\venafi\platform\schematool.exe {TPPAdmin} "\program files\venafi\schema\logging\acme.xml"