---
title: Connected systems
description: What information comes in, what goes out, and what the business notices when each connection is unavailable.
sidebar:
  label: Connections
  order: 7
---

What information comes in, what goes out, and what the business notices when
each connection is unavailable.

## Microsoft 365 mailboxes

| | |
| --- | --- |
| **What comes in** | Mail from enrolled Flowtech mailboxes: subject, body, sender and recipients, date, and all attachments — including files nested inside forwarded messages |
| **What goes out** | Replies and quotations sent from FlowOS. The shared office mailbox is the reply-to even when the engineer is the from |
| **Which side is authoritative for inbound** | The mailbox. FlowOS holds a copy of what was received |
| **How current** | As current as the last successful delta. Each mailbox has its own cursor |
| **When unavailable** | Sync records the error and consecutive failures. Everything already held stays fully workable |

The mail body is taken in its formatted form and converted here, because
letting the mail service flatten it loses table structure — an enquiry listing
three instruments in a table would otherwise arrive as one value per line.

**Sent Items:** the internet message id of mail FlowOS sends is recorded.
Without it, delta sync would ingest our own quotation as a new inbound
document. Combined with scoping the delta to Inbox.

## Entra ID

| | |
| --- | --- |
| **What comes in** | Who the person is, for Microsoft sign-in |
| **What FlowOS owns** | Office, roles, grants, password invites. Office is not read from Entra |
| **When unavailable** | Microsoft sign-in fails. Password accounts still sign in. Existing sessions continue until they expire |

## The language-model service

Used for the reading that cannot be done by rule: labelling each message,
judging whether a message changes anything technical, pulling out job
references, splitting an enquiry into line items, and extracting each line's
parameters.

| | |
| --- | --- |
| **What goes out** | The text of the mail and the attached documents |
| **What comes in** | The labels, the line-item split, and the extracted parameters |
| **Which side is authoritative** | FlowOS. Nothing is stored on the other side that we read back |
| **When unavailable** | **Message labelling fails safe** — the message is treated as an enquiry, so an RFQ is never hidden by an outage. **The reading of an enquiry fails** — the case is marked failed and stays in the queue. Other work continues |

Several choices exist to keep this connection's use down — a single-instrument
enquiry takes a fast path, a reply that changes nothing does not trigger a
re-read, and one call covers all the line items in a category.

Customer enquiry text and datasheets are sent to this service. Where it is
hosted, and under what agreement, is a question for the business.

## The document reader

Converts attachments to text, including character recognition for scanned
pages. Recognition runs on the deployment.

| | |
| --- | --- |
| **When unavailable** | Scanned documents report that recognition was skipped, rather than reporting the document as blank. Everything else still converts |

## The ERP of record

| | |
| --- | --- |
| **What goes out** | Confirmed sales orders, after PO-vs-quote verification |
| **What comes in** | Acceptance, rejection, and reconciliation state per attempt |
| **Which side is authoritative for stock and dispatch** | The ERP |
| **When unavailable** | The handoff row stays in the queue and can be retried. Postgres is truth; the queue message is transport |

## The defect tracker

The floating **Report a problem** control sends a defect with the page they
were on and their browser details. When unavailable, they are told it did not
send. Nothing else is affected.

## Not connected

| System | Position |
| --- | --- |
| **Stock / dispatch / invoicing** | Stay in the ERP after handoff |
| **IMAP as a second mail path** | Mail comes from Microsoft 365 Graph |