Unica Director is here – Introduction to Director with high level use cases for Unica Campaign

Did you know – Flowchart execution monitoring, migration, cleaning up the temp tables and temp files, old log files are now at your finger-tips:

The Unica Director was one of the significant components of the version 11.1 release of Unica. The administrators can manage critical aspects of the whole suite with the Director module. However, we will focus on what users can do with the Director in the Unica Marketing Campaign on this blog.

The Unica Campaign application has been serving Marketing community successfully for a couple of decades now. It has strong capabilities in the marketing segmentation and execution. It empowers customers to segment a huge amount of data and target marketing messages using flowchart executions. With strong feature capabilities and customization, there was also a requirement to manage and maintain the infrastructure.

As marketers run hundred or more campaigns a day sometimes to the tune of thousands a month, it is imperative to –  –

• Maintain the health of the Campaign application and manage the infrastructure
• Design and implement Campaign design and execution practice across development, pre-production and production environments

Campaign environment Infrastructure Management with Director

Campaigns are critical for the businesses, And Campaign administrators make sure the flowcharts are running efficiently and effectively delivering offers to the customers. So, what do the administrators (either Campaign or system or DB) need to take care and maintain the health of Campaign application? –

Few of the most essential things are as follows-

1. Campaign Application components are always up – Campaign web application and Campaign Analytical Server etc.
2. Make sure the Campaign flowcharts are running and do not fail or remain stuck for a long time.
3. Ensure that flow charts are getting completed in the required time frame, so the delivery engines or Campaign output is being used for marketing in Call Center operations, etc.
4. Make sure Campaign user data connection is successful.

Meeting these conditions would ensure the smooth performance of daily operations in Campaign design and execution, but this is not sufficient to maintain health. To maintain the health of the application users must –

1. Periodically clean up the logs and other temporary files generated in Campaign execution
2. Regularly clean up the temporary tables generated in Campaign execution.
3. Monitor the CPU and memory utilization on Campaign listener machine
4. Quick action to start/stop the Campaign components (Web application and listener)
5. Understand the execution load on Campaign application and make necessary arrangements (environment upgrade, increasing the hardware resources, etc.)

This will help to maintain the health of Campaign application. However, these are not the only things you will need to do, and there might be more. The Marketing Software Director helps the users to carry out all these tasks with absolute ease. It also helps the users to manage multiple environments through a single portal.

Campaign design and execution practice across development, pre-production and production environments

It’s imperative to have a development or pre-production environment while designing and executing campaigns. Any new flowchart designs, executions should be first developed and tested in development or pre-production environment and then implement on the production system. We understand designing flowcharts is not an easy activity, and it involves multiple iterations. However, once the campaign is finalized, it needs to be migrated to the production environment with quick steps.

Development and pre-production systems should be the exact replica of the production environment. This is with respect to the Campaign version and deployment architecture. Pre-production and development system can run on lower hardware resources than production systems.

It might be possible you have more than these environments available you are worried about maintaining all these environments health.

Amazingly, more is available with quick access in Director v11.1

 You can check out our blog on Campaign Best Practices for further information on improving the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Meanwhile, stay tuned for the next post in this series about Marketing Director and version 11.1

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