Targeted Newsletter App

In 2006 this chip-maker hired me to do a Data Quality Dashboard project for one of their groups.

As often happens, there was some roadblock with the planning & they asked if I’d do this small web application in the meantime.

A very basic user interface accepting spreadsheets for data input, preparing order files and dropping them on the ESB for delivery to a 3rd party vendor who handles the generation and sendout.

This small utility app enabled marketers to prepare datafiles for submission to a 3rd party vendor who did mass-email newsletter generation, targeting individual subscribers with customized content which matches their own interests.

I include here because this project fundamentally changed how I approach software design for enterprise applications.

For me it was an important first exposure to a real world enterprise service bus. This was the very start of me thinking of applications as participants in a larger ecosystem.

This in turn changed how I design software overall.

System Details:

Inputs were a number of Excel spreadsheets containing recipient info, offers, and a few other items like taglines and text copy.

Outputs were xml files and a bus message which initiated the newsletter vendor's pickup of the new output.