Using Outbound E-mail but managing contacts from an external system

Outbound E-mail (and Audience Manager)

Since the first time I "met" TMCS, I must say I have been quite fond of it. With 2009, "he" changed his name into Outbound E-mail, which definitely helped to clarify what it was all about! Outbound E-mail (and Audience Manager) were now integrated in the SDL Tridion GUI! And some new capabilities were also added.

I really like the business strategy behind using Outbound E-mail. The Web channel is definitely important when engaging users, but we should not forget how powerful the e-mail channel still is these days. For instance, a lot of promotions are greatly successful because existing or potential customers are approach via e-mail. And not only can they target their customers but also measure their (clicking) actions on the email, etc.

Just a little note on the relation between Outbound E-mail and Audience Manager. Quite often, we talk about Outbound E-mail implying the use of Audience Manager too. They are two separate modules, but work together to bring the e-mails and e-mail campaigns to the customers. End users experience work with both modules transparently, as if it was one. For further clarification, read below a line by SDL live documentation on their scope:

Audience Manager enables marketing departments to gather information about audiences, such as interests and characteristics. Outbound E-mail is for marketing departments that need to implement and manage e-mail communication campaigns.

Having said that, let me get back to my original goal here, write about my experiences with OE (I will use the acronym from now on). First round of OE coming!!!

A toast

Where is Wally/Waldo? Imagine I impersonate Wally for a moment... Then Wally is in China!

My trip to China last Saturday was... to say the least... very long. 24 hours. I had two or three delays, 12hours in total; I encountered the huge language barrier, had to ask the same question around "1000" times... etc, etc.

I want to speak from here to all the Wally's in Professional Services SDL WCMS (Tridion! ;)). I want to propose a toast to all of you, us, travellers, consultants.

(Did you already take your drink? :D)

Because being a Wally can be exciting and beautiful! But it can also come with a lot of inconveniences. To all of you, because you do a great job and you keep on smiling! What else can we ask for? Oh yeah... the drink!!!!

Cheeers!!!!!!!!! 

Manipulating (embedded!) fields from a Custom URL resource

As of SDL Tridion 2011, we have a new API for manipulating fields within Web resources referenced by Custom URLs. You can find some basic examples on live documentation.

I got a question by a customer on how exactly to deal with embedded fields. I played around a little bit with it and I thought… let‘s share the result!  :) It is actually pretty simple, we deal with embedded fields in the same way as we do for the rest of fields.

My use case

Custom URL associated to field Paragraphs:

·         Embedded schema Field, that contains two inner fields

o   Heading

o   Text

·         Multivalue

When we click on the Paragraphs field description, we will set default values to both heading and text as an example. This is the expected result: