StrongMail presentation given to BigTen IT folks for University Advancement, on July 21, 2009

1. DYNAMIC CONTENT DELIVERY
USING STRONGMAIL
July 2009
Presented by
Christopher M. Harper
Manager of Information Technology
University Relations, Michigan State University
charper@msu.edu (517) 355-9980
DYNAMIC CONTENT DELIVERY WITH STRONGMAIL 1
JULY 2009

2. What is StrongMail?
StrongMail?
g
• Vendor/solution selected after an RFP process conducted
by University Relations
( )
• Both on-site (installed)
and hosted (off-site,
managed) options
were considered
during RFP
• During RFP decided best
ROI would be with an on campus solution
p
DYNAMIC CONTENT DELIVERY WITH STRONGMAIL 2
JULY 2009

3. What is StrongMail? (cont’d)
StrongMail? (
g )
• StrongMail as a dynamic messaging platform
• Capable of sending 1 million messages per hour*
hour
• Dynamic message composition; no more static e-mails!
• Automatic bounce management, but not j hard and
g , just
soft…
Hard Soft
Block Technical Unknown
bounce bounce
* This is why it is critical to have a Message Transfer Agent (or MTA) that gives you the ability to adhere to the sending rules the ISP’s have in
place at any given moment in time. See http://www.strongmail.com/resources/blogs/it_email_infrastructure/ for more details.
an gi en time http //www strongmail com/reso rces/blogs/it email infrastr ct re/ details
DYNAMIC CONTENT DELIVERY WITH STRONGMAIL 3
JULY 2009

4. Okay, but where’s the need?
y
• University Relations (UR) at MSU in charge of sending
daily,
daily weekly MSU news stories to various audiences
audiences,
amounting to over 400,000 messages per month
• UR has been doing this for 5+ years
g y
math: 400,000 x 12 x 5 =
approx. 24 million messages to date!
• Old technology beca e antiquated,
O d ec o ogy became a qua ed,
cumbersome for IT staff to manage (required
IT to be involved to send messages, required
manual replacement of li k with dynamic
l l t f links ith d i
equivalents to track link click through rates)
DYNAMIC CONTENT DELIVERY WITH STRONGMAIL 4
JULY 2009

5. Okay, but where’s the need? (cont’d)
y ( )
• UR also (in a fee-for-service model) designs, builds,
sends e-mails for various departments on campus, to their alumni,
e mails
donors, students, etc.
• Needed a self-service interface putting the “marketer”
back in control (too many people outsourcing to Constant Contact,
etc.)
• More robust message composition platform capable of
o e obus essage co pos o p a o capab e o
doing more dynamically
• XML, XSLT, subscriber content preferences anyone?
• Ability to connect to databases external to the platform
(something any other E-mail Service Provider (ESP) external to MSU
won t
won’t be able to do)
DYNAMIC CONTENT DELIVERY WITH STRONGMAIL 5
JULY 2009

6. Task: Make MSU Weekly News dynamic
y y
• Migrate MSU Weekly News to a dynamic e-mail
publication,
publication allowing subscribers to customize their content
preferences
• Already had web applications written to capture
subscriber preferences (in essence)
• Needed to determine how the message template would interact
with these preferences
• Via what technology?
• Transition to a new IP address on the MTA, establish
new sending relationship with the internet, ISP’s
DYNAMIC CONTENT DELIVERY WITH STRONGMAIL 6
JULY 2009

7. Task: Make MSU Weekly… (completed)
y ( p )
• SM deployed and sending our
MSU Weekly News e-mail every Friday
y y y
• Subscribers can customize their
e-mail by including content from 13 categories
of news available on www.news.msu.edu
• Staff and faculty automatically
opted in to receive “Staff and faculty” content
(allowed for the printed staff and faculty
publication MSU News
Bulletin to become
completely “electronic”)
electronic )
DYNAMIC CONTENT DELIVERY WITH STRONGMAIL 7
JULY 2009

8. Task: Make SM available to campus
p
• Identify good campus candidates and make StrongMail
available to them in a self-service model
self service
• Migrate various managed campaigns from old MTA to
StrongMail
• Determine any external databases that StrongMail could
be connected to
• Sysbase ASE Oracle MSSQL, Teradata DB2 PostgreSQL
ASE, Oracle, MSSQL Teradata, DB2, PostgreSQL,
mySQL
UR EBSP UADV
DYNAMIC CONTENT DELIVERY WITH STRONGMAIL 8
JULY 2009

9. Task: Make SM available… (on-going)
(
(on-g g)
• Currently 2 departments are on-board in a self-service
capacity
• Enterprise Business Systems Projects (EBSP)
• University Advancement (UADV)
DYNAMIC CONTENT DELIVERY WITH STRONGMAIL 9
JULY 2009

10. Task: Make SM available… (on-going)
(
(on-g g)
• Several other departments sending e-mail via UR and ultimately via StrongMail
DYNAMIC CONTENT DELIVERY WITH STRONGMAIL 10
JULY 2009

11. Task: Make SM available… (on-going)
(
(on-g g)
DYNAMIC CONTENT DELIVERY WITH STRONGMAIL 11
JULY 2009

12. A dynamic MSU Weekly News e-mail
y y e-
• Database of stories that drives www.news.msu.edu
subsequently drives e-mail process
DYNAMIC CONTENT DELIVERY WITH STRONGMAIL 12
JULY 2009

13. A dynamic MSU Weekly News e-mail
y y e-
• Fields available at the time of inputting the story for
the web made available to e-mail template via XML
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JULY 2009

14. A dynamic MSU Weekly News e-mail
y y e-
• The XML content is transformed by an XSL template,
driven by an XSLT engine within StrongMail
DYNAMIC CONTENT DELIVERY WITH STRONGMAIL 14
JULY 2009

15. A dynamic MSU Weekly News e-mail
y y e-
• A fundamentally different e-mail is generated for each
MSU Weekly News subscriber based on their content preferences
DYNAMIC CONTENT DELIVERY WITH STRONGMAIL 15
JULY 2009

16. A dynamic MSU Weekly News e-mail
y y e-
• So think of the possibilities…
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JULY 2009

17. And now… a demo!
DYNAMIC CONTENT DELIVERY WITH STRONGMAIL 17
JULY 2009