Case Study: Fixing Email Chaos & Automating Navision Sync

Schiller France, a provider of medical diagnostic equipment, relies on Redmine to manage customer support and contact data. Two critical issues made the system unreliable in daily operations: broken email handling in Redmine Helpdesk and inconsistent contact synchronization from Microsoft Navision.

RedmineX resolved both by stabilizing email processing and building a fully automated CRM sync pipeline—without requiring any change of tools.

1. Navision → Redmine CRM Contact Sync

Why Contact Sync Was Failing

Schiller France manages customer data in Microsoft Navision but relies on Redmine CRM for daily operations. Keeping contacts synchronized was essential—but unreliable.

The export/import process exposed multiple issues:

• Inconsistent formatting across names, phone numbers, and addresses

• Encoding problems with French characters causing broken imports

• Duplicate and conflicting contact records

• Structural mismatch between Navision data and Redmine CRM fields

• Occasional incomplete exports breaking the import process

• No logging, making troubleshooting slow and unclear

Manual fixes were required repeatedly, making the process unsustainable.

Building a Reliable Data Pipeline

RedmineX replaced the fragile import process with a controlled and automated synchronization pipeline.

• Data sanitization layer

  Cleaned and normalized exported data (formatting, encoding, duplicates)

• Custom mapping

  Ensured correct alignment between Navision structure and Redmine CRM

• Automated cron synchronization

  Scheduled imports to keep CRM data consistently up to date

• Logging and diagnostics

  Implemented detailed logs to track each run and quickly identify issues

What looked like a simple import required building a resilient integration layer.

From Manual Fixes to Automation

• Contact data in Redmine CRM is now consistently accurate

• Duplicate and corrupted records are prevented

• The system handles imperfect input data without breaking

• Issues can be diagnosed quickly using logs

• Manual intervention has been almost entirely eliminated

The result is a stable, automated contact synchronization between Navision and Redmine.

2. Helpdesk Stabilization

Email Chaos in Daily Support

Redmine Helpdesk is a core tool for Schiller France. Support teams depend on it to process incoming emails, diagnostics, and customer communication.

Once HTML email handling was enabled (necessary for images and formatting), the system became unreliable:

• Emails contained excessive whitespace caused by scrambled HTML (<div>, <p>, &nbsp;)

• Reply history was not removed, resulting in duplicated & looping email threads

• Images inserted via CKEditor were not included in outgoing emails.

This forced support agents to manually clean messages and limited their ability to send clear, structured replies.

Rebuilding the Helpdesk Layer

RedmineX addressed the root problem: how Redmine Helpdesk processes HTML emails.

• HTML cleanup and normalization
  Removed unnecessary elements and fixed rendering so emails display cleanly

• Reliable email parsing
  Adjusted reply detection to consistently remove previous conversation threads

• Inline image support
  Enabled proper embedding of images in outgoing emails

These changes ensured emails are correctly processed, displayed, and sent.

Support Workflow Restored

• Emails are now readable without manual cleanup

• Replies no longer contain duplicated threads

• Support agents can include screenshots directly in responses

The Helpdesk became reliable again without changing workflows or replacing the system.

Support Workflow Restored

By addressing both Helpdesk reliability and CRM data synchronization, Schiller France stabilized two critical operational layers:

• Customer data management (Redmine CRM)

• Customer communication (Redmine Helpdesk)

Instead of replacing their system, they extended it—removing friction, reducing manual work, and ensuring consistent daily operations.

Key Takeaway

What appeared to be two isolated issues—email formatting and contact import—were actually systemic reliability problems.

By fixing the underlying processing layers, RedmineX turned Redmine into a stable, production-ready platform for both support and CRM.