As we tread deeper into the buzzword-infested waters of Web 2.0, we often hear terms that sound vaguely tech-related and desirable but we have no idea what they actually mean. One of these words is integration. There has been an industry-wide increase in web service integration as of late, making this the ideal time to jump on the boat.

By the time you are done reading this article, my aim is to help you understand what integration is, how it works, and why you should want it.

What is integration?

The term integration when used in the context of web applications is usually referring to the act of establishing a relationship between one application and another. The most widely used protocol for this kind of relationship is SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol). This protocol is based on its spiritual predecessor, XML-RPC (XML Remote Procedure Call), which uses the same kind of HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) connection that your favorite web browser makes to Google.com (for example) to send data back and forth.

SOAP was intentionally designed like this to enable it to bypass corporate firewall restrictions by fooling the corporate firewalls into thinking that it’s just web traffic. This is one of the main reasons that the protocol has become an industry standard today. SOAP messages are specified in XML (Extensible Markup Language) and contain both the data itself and information about how the data is structured (metadata).

How does it work?

The basic premise behind integration is that applications provide services. For example, Google offers web search services, Flickr offers photo sharing services, and Facebook offers social networking services.

The way we normally access these services is to get on the website and instruct the application what to do by clicking a bunch of buttons and/or filling out form fields. But did you know that the website you see is just a façade? It’s not the application itself. Rather it is an interface to the application, a visual representation of your interaction with the application.

The application doesn’t care whether it’s getting instructions from a website visitor or from another application. All that it cares about is getting instructions that it can understand so that it can provide the services that it offers.

That sounds great, but how does that help me?

Have you ever wondered if it’s possible to automate at least some of the interactions that you have with other web applications? Well I have news for you, the answer is most likely yes. To give a real example, there is a client of ours who has a weekly newsletter. Their weekly newsletter is templated so all that he has to do is fill in the content. He grabs the content manually from another source and copy/pastes it into the email creative. However, there is a lot of content. This process takes him about an hour.

With the power of web services, this client can now automate the entire process so that all he has to do is glance over the final email before sending it out. That’s a fairly significant gain in productivity, reducing a 1 hour task to a 1 minute task.

So how do you know what kind of things you can automate this way? To answer this question, think about the things you do daily that are tedious and repetitive. Most likely, an application could be doing those things for you. Do you have a bi-weekly subscriber list upload, a weekly opt-out report, or something similar? These are all examples of things that can be automated using web services.

One thing to note with doing this kind of integration is that it requires a small amount of work from your tech team. They will need some information about the web services that the target application offers. Typically they need the API (Application Programming Interface) documentation and information about the security method employed(if any) for the application. Usually, secure SOAP transactions employ TLS (Transport Layer Security) and some kind of credentials in the SOAP message itself.

For the Publicaster API documentation, click here.

This article has only scratched the surface of what integration and service-oriented architecture are capable of. We predict that this trend will continue to grow and allow us to build web applications that are seamlessly interconnected and provide us with feature-rich content and services.

We’d like to hear people’s perspectives and viewpoints on the issue. Contact us with any questions or to share your thoughts.

Blue Sky Factory is pleased to announce the availability of a new API that clients can leverage to provide a seamless experience for their users. The new API is called ‘Forward to a Friend’. As you can imagine, this expands upon Publicaster’s already popular Forward to Friend feature. Now you can create and host your own customized Forward to a Friend landing page and simply pass the data along to Publicaster for inclusion in a Publicaster defined email that gets sent to the Forward to a Friend targets.

What makes the API so special is that you have total control of the form you want the users to fill out and you have the ability to work with the data. The general flow of things using our API is this: (1)You create and host your forward to a friend form on your own site (users never leave the comfort of your environment). (2)When the form is submitted, you call our API to activate our Forward To Friend code. (3)Then you can take that data (since you have never left control of your site) and put it into an internal sales leads database or shoot it into your SalesForce database – the choice is yours.

Ok, now let’s talk about how to get this set up and working from within Publicaster. The Forward to Friend API will use an existing email content you have already defined in Publicaster. You will notice when you are in the email editor a new field called ‘Campaign ID.’ Make a note of this ID – you will need it for the API.

Lets take a look at the API argument signature. It’s really pretty straight forward.

SendtoFriend(ByVal CampaignID As String, _
ByVal AccountID As String, _
ByVal FromName As String, _
ByVal FromAddress As String, _
ByVal SubjectLine As String, _
ByVal MailContent As String, _
ByVal StringOemails As String) As emailStats

Campaign ID – This is the ID (remember I told you to keep track of it) of the email template you want to send to the potential subscribers.

AccountID – This is your encrypted account id. Existing API users are very familiar with this little nugget. If you are not, you can get your encrypted API from Account Manager -> Account Preferences (at the bottom).

FromName – This is a string that you pass that will display in the email that is being sent ad the Friendly From Name.

FromAddress – This is a string that will display in the email as the Reply-To address.

SubjectLine – Another, you guessed it, string that will display as the subject line in the email.

MainContent – A string where you can specify a custom message you want to append to the top body portion of the email you are sending. A very popular Forward to a Friend feature is a little blurb of text the person who using the form may want to pass on to their users. For example: “Hey All – thought you might find this interesting!” In addition to the exiting Publicaster content, we will put this text right after the closing body tag.

Hint: A heavy graphical based email may not work best for Forward To Friend. Make sure before you start using Forward To Friend that you test to make sure the format is like you want.

StringOEmails – Well we know it’s definitely a string. Actually, to be a little nerdy, it’s a pipe “” delimited string. So for the list of emails you want to send this message to, just create a pipe delimited string- well parse and validate and only send to valid emails. Eg ‘foobar@blah.com,jimmybuffett@margaritivalle.com,chomp@chew.com’

We also provide a return object so you can tell if your send was successful. The name of the object is ‘emailStats’ and it will return:

SendSuccess – A Boolean telling you if the emails were sent.
numSent – Tells you how many emails were actually sent.
errorDescription – In the event of a problem, we will tell you exactly what happened.

How to exactly use a web service really depends on what language you are using. But for some general 101 type of info check out.

http://www.15seconds.com/Issue/010530.htm
http://webservices.xml.com/pub/a/ws/2004/03/24/phpws.html
http://www.asp101.com/articles/colin/webservices/default.asp

Let’s talk about a few things that our Forward to a Friend feature will NOT do. First, we do not store the users email in our database. We require any subscriber that is entered into our database be opted in. If a user fills out a Forward To Friend form and click submit, the people getting the email never opted in to anything so they cannot be stored in Publicaster. Second, we don’t track any stats on who the mail was sent to and if they acted on the mail. Again, it’s because they are not Publicaster Opt-in user so we don’t store them in our database. Also, any Publicaster customizations you have in your Forward to a Friend Email will be stripped out and not sent to the user.

If you would like full documentation or example on this new API – please email bsfsupport@blueskyfactory.com.

A couple of other upcoming IT stuff here at the Factory. We are in the final testing phases of our new List Import tool that will allow you to import Excel files! Also, we are launching an API next month that will let you send an Publicaster email to an already defined list without ever logging into Publicaster. Stayed tuned for news and information!

In case you aren’t up to date with all of the latest and greatest technical terminology, API stands for “Application Programming Interface.” In short, API’s, also known as “web services,” allow you to share and manipulate data between two entirely separate systems.

Using an API, a Publicaster user could link their CRM or in-house database to a Publicaster database. This would synch the data between the two systems, thus eliminating the need for a manual import and export of email lists. This is just one simple example of how an API can be used with Publicaster.

We are pleased to announce that Publicater 6.0 offers its clients an extensive set of SOAP-based API’s. These API’s can be utilized by our customers to add to and manipulate the data that has been loaded into their Publicaster account. The API allows clients to interact with the Publicaster database and customize and tailor their user experience. This offers our clients the ability to have granular control over what data is sent to Publicaster, while giving them the opportunity to work with the data for internal purposes.

Our current API encompasses both the List Management and Subscriber Management elements of Publicaster. A detailed list of methods can be found below:

List Management:

• Mailing List: Add To Mailing Lists - Allows the user to bulk load data into a mailing list(s) without going through the Publicaster interface.
• Mailing List: Get All Lists - Returns a list of all mailing lists defined for an account.
• Mailing List: Get Entire List - Returns the subscriber data contained in a mailing list. Note: this method returns records in groups of 10,000 rows. Successive calls to the service may be necessary to get the full list.
• Mailing List: Get Field Names - Returns the columns that are included in the mailing list.
• Mailing List: Get List Details - Returns basic list information such as date created and the database the list is created against.
• Mailing List: Get Lists By Database - Returns a list of all mailing lists defined against a particular database.
• Mailing List: Get Opt-Out List - Returns a list of users that have opted out of an Account. Note: this method returns records in groups of 10,000 rows. Successive calls to the service may be necessary to get the full list.

Subscriber Management:

• Subscriber: Add Subscriber - Adds a single subscriber to a mailing list.
• Subscriber: Delete From List - Deletes a subscriber from a list by email address.
• Subscriber: Edit By Subscriber Email - Edits a subscriber detail by email address.
• Subscriber: Edit Status - Updates a subscriber’s status by email address.
• Subscriber: Get Details By Email - Returns subscriber detail by email address.

If you need detailed information on the arguments required, please contact Blue Sky Factory Support. Happy programming!