We've got a rather thin crowd for the Best Practices for Utilizing ExactTarget's SOAP APIs session. Apparently everyone is already implementing the API in the best possible way...or think they are :)
Manager of the Product Specialist department Dale McCrory returns to the stage for this presentation and starts the session by asking people what topics they would like to see covered today. The first question was on documentation.
YAY! I love when people care about the documentation!
Web Service API Documentation
Dale brings up http://wiki.memberlandingpages.com to demonstrate all of the wonderful web service API documentation that's available there. He takes the group through a technical article on asynchronous processing, the CREATE method, an object, and a property. Bryan Wade, the embedded expert at ExactTarget and emcee of the session, asks how many people in the room have been to the wiki before, and about half of the room had already visited. I think the rest will visit before too long.
Content Management
The second question is about content management and best practices for it. Dale pulls up the AMPscript page in the documentation wiki to find the HTTPGet() function. This function performs a get call against a URL and brings back the content. This tool can be used to interact with an outside system in include the content in the emails.
AMPscript also support XSLT now, so you can interact with ExactTarget with you XML content. The BuildRowSetFromXML() function extends this capability.
Slide Presentation
With the two questions addressed, Bryan prods Dale to get back to the slideshow. The slides cover:
Security
Standards-based SOAP security to support authentication
All calls transmit over an SSL connection. The API supports two forms of security:
Reliability
In this section, we're talking about synchronous versus asynchronous API processing again. Asynchronous processing adds all calls to a queue to be processed when the system is ready, which prevents API calls from being lost if the server is unavailable for any reason.
Other benefits include:
Robustness
Dale quotes Wikipedia: "Robustness is the quality of being able to withstand stresses, pressures, or changes in procedure or circumstance."
Triggered sends represent the quickest way to get an email sent from the ExactTarget system. Key points help decide whether to use user-initiated (list-based) sends or triggered sends:
Flexibility
This topic starts with a discussion of data extensions. Data extension are
Email, images, and files, oh my!
Text-only email will be supported with 135, in addition to the HTML and HTML/Text multi-part formats.
The Portfolio object allows you to host files in ExactTarget. Images and files that you import into our system are hosted by Akamai, so when people hit these files, they are highly available and don't use your company's bandwidth.
Using AMPscript, you can attach files to your email, but you should use this feature with caution. There's a page for the documentation that's going to be published very soon that talks about best practices for attachments so that you can protect your deliverability while using this feature.
Stats Retrieval and Tracking Events
We ran out of time for the stats retrieval, so we went straight to question and answer, which went by too fast for me to keep up, especially while I"m still on this documentation cloud. :)
Manager of the Product Specialist department Dale McCrory returns to the stage for this presentation and starts the session by asking people what topics they would like to see covered today. The first question was on documentation.
YAY! I love when people care about the documentation!
Web Service API Documentation
Dale brings up http://wiki.memberlandingpages.com to demonstrate all of the wonderful web service API documentation that's available there. He takes the group through a technical article on asynchronous processing, the CREATE method, an object, and a property. Bryan Wade, the embedded expert at ExactTarget and emcee of the session, asks how many people in the room have been to the wiki before, and about half of the room had already visited. I think the rest will visit before too long.
Content Management
The second question is about content management and best practices for it. Dale pulls up the AMPscript page in the documentation wiki to find the HTTPGet() function. This function performs a get call against a URL and brings back the content. This tool can be used to interact with an outside system in include the content in the emails.
AMPscript also support XSLT now, so you can interact with ExactTarget with you XML content. The BuildRowSetFromXML() function extends this capability.
Slide Presentation
With the two questions addressed, Bryan prods Dale to get back to the slideshow. The slides cover:
- Security
- Reliability
- Robustness
- Flexibility
- Messaging content
- Stats retrieval - tracking events
Security
Standards-based SOAP security to support authentication
All calls transmit over an SSL connection. The API supports two forms of security:
- Plain text username token. This is what everyone's using right now.
- X509 certificate encryption for the username token will be available in the 135 release.
Reliability
In this section, we're talking about synchronous versus asynchronous API processing again. Asynchronous processing adds all calls to a queue to be processed when the system is ready, which prevents API calls from being lost if the server is unavailable for any reason.
Other benefits include:
- The fact that you get a sub-second response to the fact that the call has been received.
- You have multiple options to receive results: HTTP post, Email, and the RETRIEVE API call.
- The ConversationID concept that's used with asynch API processing allows you to resend the same call without worrying that it will actually be processed twice if the system had already queued the request.
Robustness
Dale quotes Wikipedia: "Robustness is the quality of being able to withstand stresses, pressures, or changes in procedure or circumstance."
Triggered sends represent the quickest way to get an email sent from the ExactTarget system. Key points help decide whether to use user-initiated (list-based) sends or triggered sends:
- How do you want to aggregate tracking?
List based sends aggregate tracking by job. Triggered sends aggregate tracking over a time period when the triggered send was running. - How will email content be made available to the ExactTarget system?
- How are unsubscribes managed?
List based sends record unsubs at the list level, or at the All Subscribers level. If a person unsubscribes from a triggered send, they can be unsubscribed from all triggered sends. - How large are your lists?
If you have 1.5 million subscribers, you should start with list based. If you are sending individual messages in response to customer activity, triggered sends are the way to go.
- Are attribute sets going to be the same for all sends?
If so, you can use lists because you set up attributes for all lists together. If you need different attribute sets for different subsets of clients, then you want data extensions. - Is import performance critical?
If you have 1.5 million subscribers to import, you can import them into a data extension in 10 minutes versus 1-2 hours for a list (this is an approximation...the number of attributes has a big effect on performance as well). - How will unsubscribes be managed?
Each list maintains its own unsubscribes. Data extensions maintain unsubscribes in publication lists. - Bonus point not in the slide: if you are a partner building an application, you probably want to build on lists if possible, because they cost less.
Flexibility
This topic starts with a discussion of data extensions. Data extension are
- The only way to use the API to do "rich" queries of data
- The way you can add relational models of data en masse or row-by-row
- Very fast
- Tables in our database schema that are specific to your account
- Allows the use of upsert
- Ties to the DataExtension by CustomerKey (called "external key" in the GUI)
- Allows specification of Keys and Nulls
- There's also a DataExtensionObject that you can retrieve to bring back a row in the data extension.
Email, images, and files, oh my!
Text-only email will be supported with 135, in addition to the HTML and HTML/Text multi-part formats.
The Portfolio object allows you to host files in ExactTarget. Images and files that you import into our system are hosted by Akamai, so when people hit these files, they are highly available and don't use your company's bandwidth.
Using AMPscript, you can attach files to your email, but you should use this feature with caution. There's a page for the documentation that's going to be published very soon that talks about best practices for attachments so that you can protect your deliverability while using this feature.
Stats Retrieval and Tracking Events
We ran out of time for the stats retrieval, so we went straight to question and answer, which went by too fast for me to keep up, especially while I"m still on this documentation cloud. :)
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