Blogs

Despite it being April Fool's Day, this is no joke. It's 4.1 on 4/1.

StrongMail EAS and Message Studio 4.1 are now available for download. These latest releases of the StrongMail software have a lot a great new features that will appeal to a wide range of users. Customers using Message Studio 3.2.x will be especially interested in the new Migration Tool that we have included which will make the transition from version 3 to version 4 a snap!

Here's a quick breakdown of some of the new features in each version--

StrongMail EAS 4.1

• Overflow to Disk
  Customers can now configure their injecting applications to send SMTP messages to a StrongMail server at a high sustained rate. The StrongMail server buffers the incoming messages to disk to avoid sending server busy messages back to the injecting application. There are two modes, Memory Queue and Disk Queue, that users can choose based on their business requirements.
  

• Pause/Resume Message Assembly API
  StrongMail has added the ability for applications to request that message assembly be paused temporarily but still allow the StrongMail server to continue to accept transactional mailing SEND requests and queue them up until a resume request is received. This enables users to make changes to the transactional mailing without having to shut down the entire transactional messaging process.
  

Message Studio 4.1

• Transactional Mailings
  Customers now have the ability to create, manage, and test transactional mailings through the Message Studio user interface.
  

• User-Defined Asset Lists
  Most menu categories now support user-defined lists. Users can select items and either right-click or drag-and-drop items into the list to create your a custom collection for browsing and organizing data.
  

• Expanded External Data Sources
  This release introduces support for connecting to the following external databases: PostgreSQL, Sybase, IBM DB/2.
  

• Automated Web Analytics Tags
  The Add Tracking Tags screen has been enhanced to allow users to easily add parameters to the tracking URLs that are utilized by web analytics applications. Users can create their own tags or modify the default tags for the following products: Omniture, Coremetrics, and Google Analytics. This feature works with any link-based web analytics software.
  

• Target Editor Enhancements
  The Target Query editor now supports grouping terms with parentheses and allows the of deleting specific terms from a query. Additionally, a data preview button allows users to browse the values contained in a database column and select the value into the query.
  

• Migration Tool
  A new migration tool enables the migration of data from existing Message Studio installations from versions 3.2.3 and 3.2.4 to version 4.1 (upgrades from 4.0 do not need to migrate any data). The migration utility is automatically invoked when you run the setup script for Message Studio 4.1 using the upgrade mode.
  

These are just the highlights. There's much more in each of these releases than I have room to list. If you are a current StrongMail customer, visit the Support Portal today or contact StrongMail Support to get ready for Version 4.1! If you are not a current StrongMail customer and want more information about version 4.1, contact our Sales team to learn more.

When I travel to visit customers or get on calls with prospects, I am often asked about how to aggregate the report details for multiple mailings in Message Studio. Rolling up mailing data this way is key to evaluating how your different mailing types or mailing programs are performing at a global level or over time.

In Message Studio 4.x, there is a feature that makes it easy to roll up mailings into campaigns, which allows you to view mailing response data holistically. Setting the campaign field is not required when setting up and launching mailings, but if you would like to use it, here's how--

1. Go to ADMINISTRATION tab in the left navigation panel
2. Click on CAMPAIGNS
3. Click on CREATE button
4. Enter a CAMPAIGN NAME and click SAVE
5. Click FINISH (or close the CREATE CAMPAIGN tab)
6. Repeat as necessary

Now when you set up any type of mailing in Message Studio, you can select a campaign from the CAMPAIGN drop down menu. When you want to run the campaign-level reports, just go to the REPORTS tab in the left navigation panel and select CAMPAIGNS. You can select an individual campaign or multiple campaigns to be included in the report.

The Campaign report looks similar to the Mailing report, but allows you to view the both the aggregate information and the individual mailing data. If you see something interesting at the mailing level, you can easily jump to the report for that individual mailing just by clicking on the name of the mailing. You also have ready access to the failure details for each mailing within the campaign by clicking on the failure data in the campaign report.

Campaign reports are just another way you can look at your mailing data and with Message Studio, it is easy to group mailings together in a logical way to see the macro trends instead of just reviewing each mailing in isolation.

In Message Studio 4.0, users now have the ability to easily upload all of their HTML and image files all at once. The new Media Server feature will unpack the zipped files and automatically publish all of the images to StrongMail media servers or third-party servers so that when recipients get a message, the images will be served from the specified location.

The HTML template can also contain absolute (src="http://www.myserver.com/images/2008/picture.gif") or relative (src="/images/picture.gif") paths for images. When the template is uploaded, Message Studio will scan the code for all image references. For any images that have relative paths, Message Studio will automatically convert the path to point to the specified image server.

To get started with using the media server in Message Studio 4.0, all you have to do is go to the Administration module in the left navigation panel and create connections to internal or external media servers. You can leverage the StrongMail tracking server (either on-board or off-board) as a media server or you can use a third-party server to host your images. In addition, you can set up a group of servers as a single media server for use with a load balancer.

When you set up a media server, you can designate the server as either writable or read-only. With a writable media server, when you upload a zip file with the HTML and images in it, Message Studio will upload the images into a temporary folder until you specify the media server. If you create a connection to a read-only media server, you must upload images directly to the media server outside of the Message Studio interface. If the media server configuration includes multiple servers, Message Studio will upload the file to each server.

Once you’ve set up a media server configuration in Message Studio, you can upload a zip file (containing images and a single HTML template) or an HTML template that includes image references on the Template import screen. Once you specify the media server the template should use, Message Studio will automatically update any relative image links within your HTML template to reflect the media server URL that you specified during set up.

That's it.

Now, when you preview the email template during mailing setup or when you launch the mailing and recipients view the email, the images in the template will be served by the media server.