Building the new campaignlogic

Introducing CampaignBreeze

2010-09-15T09:56:00.003+10:00

It's been very busy over the last 12 months, and although we didn't update this blog as often as we would have liked, we are excited to share the latest news.

We are just about finished with the rebuild. In fact, some clients have been using the new system for a few months now, and we have also started transitioning existing clients.

What's CampaignBreeze then?

CampaignBreeze is the name we are using for the new product. Over the course of the last 12 months, we realised the logic name no longer fit the product, so we worked to develop a new name and logo more representative of the new system.

We feel it's only fitting to end this final post with a link to a just completed video giving you a quick tour of CampaignBreeze.

Take a tour of CampaignBreeze

BETA Users Needed

2009-10-09T13:43:00.004+11:00

I think the title explains this post, so I am going to keep it brief.

We are at a stage with the new campaignlogic where it's starting to take shape, the majority of the features are in place, and some new ones, and there are not too many bugs left on our list.

As such we are looking for some beta users, as a BETA user you don't have to do much, in fact you can just have a look around, but if you do have some thoughts, find some bugs, or have some general feedback on the new campaignlogic then send it our way!

Fair warning though, this is a BETA, there are some things which are not quiet finished, and there is a good chance some features might not work 100% just yet, so if you are still keen to get a first look at the new campaignlogic sign up for the BETA here

Hopefully worth the wait

2009-09-09T15:45:00.007+10:00

Yes, it's been awhile since we have made any updates on our progress with building the new campaignlogic...

While there have been a number of milestones we were talking about doing a post for like the first email sent, the first view recorded, the first link tracked etc.. none of them really seemed that interesting unless we could show you. So we held off....

Until now...

Below is a quick recording I just made showing some of the new things in the system.. as well as possibly the first public sighting of the new interface, it has changed a lot from the original concepts.

There will be more specifics to follow.. but for now.. you can check it out below...

View the demonstration

Note: I made this video on the development servers, without asking the developers to stop working while I did it. The side effect of that is you get logged out a lot while they work... see if you can pick where that happens and watch how the system deals with it. What does this mean once we make the product live? you can time out while editing content (e.g. go to lunch) and when you come back.. just log right back in, you won't loose a thing.

Integration and Web Services - What are they all about

2009-07-21T04:51:00.000+10:00

The internet has changed a lot since we built the first version of campaignlogic almost 10 years ago. One of the most profound advancements for the internet and applications like campaignlogic, which are built on top of the internet, is the ability to have various internet sites work with each other, integrating together cohesively.

Integration is not a new concept. It is something that has been done for a very long time in software development and many other fields. In general terms, integration is enabling two systems to work together by exchanging some form of information or data between them.

The first integrations that appeared on the internet were very simplistic and were built using very different approaches and methods. Over time a model for web site to web site integration was standardized and became known as web services. The name really says it all: web services allow a web site to offer out its functionality as a service which can then be used by other web sites. (Note: Sometimes the term API, or Application Programming Interface, is used to refer to web services. When dealing with the internet, the terms API and web service are often interchangeable.)

A good example of how a web service works is delivery tracking for eCommerce web sites. Some eCommerce sites provide delivery information within their own web site. They do this by using a web service from a delivery company such as FedEx. The eCommerce site sends the tracking number to the web service provided by the delivery company, which in turn sends back information about the delivery.

If it sounds simple, that is because it really is. Find a company that provides the web service you need (i.e. the function you want to accomplish), confirm the data that web service needs, and then send it. Writing code for the web services can be more complex, although for a well designed web service, it shouldn't be.

A web service was developed for the current campaignlogic 6 years ago, prior to the standardization mentioned above, and using a customer approach (xml posts over HTTP, which interestingly is the core of how today's web services work). You can find out more about it at http://campaignlogic.truelogic.com.au/xconnect.

But what does all this have to do with the new campaignlogic? One of our primary goals in building the new campaignlogic is to ensure that everything we developed and created could be used via a web service if a client so required. That means for every feature we are building in the new campaignlogic, we are enabling a web service to provide that feature in a way that allows clients, partners and third parties to use that feature as they need.

Some examples of how web services in the new campaignlogic might be used include:

Automatically send a list of contacts to campaignlogic from a system such as a CRM or a back end database
You might have a list of contacts stored in a CRM such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, or even a custom SQL database. You could use the web services to automatically send that list of contacts to campaignlogic each night. Each night campaignlogic would import them, manage the duplicates and opt outs just like it does when you import via the site, and have the list ready for use when you login to send a campaign.

Send an automated or transactional email from another system
Perhaps you want to send an email when something occurs in a separate company system (e.g. receipt of purchase, thank you message to newly renewed accounts, etc.). The web services in the new campaignlogic will allow this to happen easily. Plus, any automated or transactional email could be sent to as many people as required based on your needs and what you are trying to achieve.

Build your own email marketing front end
Although this is probably not something most clients or partners would need, the web services we have created do allow you to develop your own email marketing web site, using our servers and network to all the heavy lifting. This means your site could be as simple as login, type a message, enter a recipient and press send. Or it could be something more advanced. It's really all up to you.

The Cloud

2009-06-18T20:58:00.003+10:00

The Cloud seems to be the new catch phrase circling the web at the moment.. and while there have been and are other terms such as Web 2.0 and Social Media/Networking the cloud is something a little different than just a term to describe a style or type of site.

To understand what The Cloud is, and why it is changing the internet around us, we need to look back at the way websites were developed, or more specifically, how they were hosted prior to The Cloud. Before The Cloud building and launching your web site was only half the battle. If you were lucky and your web site was successful you then needed to continually make sure you had enough servers and capacity to deal with the increase that comes with success and growth.

Before The Cloud there were lots of options for managing servers for web sites such as buying and manage them yourself, leasing them and paying others to manage or any other combination of these models. At the end of the day, regardless of the approach the one thing that was always the same was the need to have physical machines which took time to acquire, setup, deploy and mange, and lets not talk about what happens when physical machines fail.

So how does The Cloud change this? It makes the servers used in hosting and maintaing web sites a commodity, a commodity that can be turned on and off as needed almost instantly with only incremental cost increases. The Cloud really describers large numbers of servers that are grouped together in such a way so as their resources (processing, memory and storage) can be divided up and sold, meaning customers only pay for what they use and can increase their usage of resources almost instantly. Therefore as demand grows you can grow your infrastructure right along side, without all the old issues.

The leading internet retailer Amazon is also the current leading provider of cloud based computing (yes that is right, you can buy shoes and 300 gigabytes of web storage from the same place). Amazon provides a range of cloud services include storage, machine resources (cpu, memory) and content delivery.

So what does all this have to do with the new campaignlogic ? Well we have been using Amazon and their cloud services for things like image hosting and content delivery within the current campaignlogic system for almost 18 months. The new campaignlogic is being built to be placed completely in The Cloud from the first day it goes live. So what does that mean for our users? Well there are going to be a lot of benefits, here are a few of the big ones:

Speed. Not only can we push a lot of hardware at the new campaignlogic, we can push more hardware at it very quickly as usage grows, even to the point of creating new mail servers on demand to manage the sending of big campaigns for users.
Increased functionality. By having almost unlimited servers and resources at our disposal we can develop functionality to perform tasks that would otherwise be prohibitive.
Reliability. While no one likes to talk about outages and when things go wrong, it is part of managing web sites. By utilizing The Cloud, we can minimise the chance of an outage, and the time required to recover should one occur.

The Cloud has also changed the way we have approached the development of the new campaignlogic when it comes to things like integration and the use of third party technologies, which I will write more about in a future update.

Speed...

2009-06-01T16:15:00.003+10:00

One of the key focuses for the new campaignlogic is speed. Make pages load quicker, get things to process faster and reduce required steps. Why? So you can get done what you need to faster.

We have identified two key areas that we think can make big strides:

Importing lists
Adding groups to campaigns

If you are used to sending campaigns to less than 1,000 people, then you probably won't notice what all the fuss is about. But if you are working with larger lists, you have probably noticed that these steps can take a while.

One of the reasons we have been able to make such inroads in these areas is the improved integration of XML with database storage engines. I will save you the boring technical details of how we are using XML and databases, however we have completed building the importing of lists and adding groups to campaigns in the new campaignlogic, so I can share some of the preliminary speed benchmarks.

In the current campaignlogic, importing a list of approximately 40,000 contacts can take up to 5 minutes depending on the duplicate actions you select and the number of contacts that already exist. In the new campaignlogic, this has been benchmarked at taking less than 1 minute.

When it comes to adding contacts to a campaign, something you do for every campaign, we have made even greater improvements. Adding 40,000 contacts to a campaign currently can take a few minutes to process. In the new campaignlogic, you can add 500,000 contacts to a campaign in 15 seconds! 40,000 contacts can be added in under 2 seconds.

These times are still preliminary, and we expect to achieve even a bit more speed once we move to a live production environment.

Of course not everything is about speed. One thing we are not speeding through is the development of the new campaignlogic: every part of the process is being considered, discussed, built, tested and in some cases rebuilt after testing.

While the purpose of this blog is all about the new campaignlogic we have not forgotten the current campaignlogic.. we are still making updates and enhancements to the current campaignlogic based on user requests and feedback.

A New Look

2009-05-12T21:15:00.024+10:00

The most visible change in the new campaignlogic is how it looks, and how you navigate and use the system. This is not the first time we have changed the look and feel of campaignlogic. Some of our original users from 2000 will recognize the first look and feel we developed (see below). It was used for a couple of years, but we very quickly outgrew the popup window approach as well as the heavy use of graphics (every one of those letters in the address book is an image).

In early 2003 to tie in with the addition of adding print and SMS campaigns to campaignlogic, we created a new look and feel. This look and feel is still in use today, although we have added a lot of features and functionality to it.. such as forms, automation, multi page campaigns and much more.

For our third redesign, we looked to outside experts to assist us in developing a new look and feel. We decided on the team at OnWired, a very skilled group of user interface and application designers who are also great to work with and highly responsive.

Over a few months, and many many revisions, we developed what we feel is a highly functional and very intuitive look and feel for the new campaignlogic. While the new look and feel is still undergoing some fine tuning and tweaks as we continue to build out the functionality, we figured it was time to share it and give you a few glimpses at some of the things in store for the new campaignlogic....

Note: these are only sample pages, clicking through will show working layouts

Mike

Getting the ball rolling

2009-05-03T22:05:00.001+10:00

As a director and founder of truelogic, and someone who has worked on the campaign logic product from the first day, I have the privilege to write the first post on this blog

As you may have gathered, the purpose of this blog is to provide insight into the process, updates on the progress, and some of the things we discover along the way as we rebuild campaignlogic, our email platform, from the ground up.

I guess the obvious questions is... Why ? After 10 years... why have we decided to rebuild campaignlogic now ?

Well that is simple, we want to do things with campaignlogic and email in general that the current platform does not allow us to do. It has been almost 10 years since we wrote the first lines of code for campaignlogic, and since that time we have changed a lot in the system (just about everything) and the process of email marketing has also changed (the first version of campaignlogic did not allow for HTML based emails.. mainly due to HTML based emails not being supported in email clients).

While we could continue to develop and extend the current platform, we decided that the time was right to rebuild rather than continue to extend, and in the process develop a new platform, taking the best of what we have learned and mixing that with the latest of development technology, interface design and best practice email marketing.

In future updates, myself and others here at truelogic who are involved in various aspects of the rebuilding will be sharing their experiences and thoughts on the process.. we are aiming to cover topics including:

rebuilding the interface
enchancements and benifits
changes in development technology and methodologies
legacy issues
migration plans and business considerations with
and anything else we think you might find interesting...

So hopefully you will find some value in this blog, and should you have questions about the new campaignlogic or areas we do or don't cover on this blog don't hesitate to let us know and we will do our best to address them.

Mike