petrklim September 14, 2015 at 12:46

Siebel Email Marketing Server Setup

Introduction

Siebel CRM is about interacting with customers within three main groups of processes: sales, marketing and service. Siebel by default supports almost all the main communication channels: Email, SMS, CTI, Web. This article only looks at the opportunities Siebel provides for marketing through the Email channel.

Task:Set up an infrastructure for marketing email marketing. This infrastructure should allow collecting information about non-delivery of messages, opening messages and clicking on links inside messages. Letters should be personified, that is, contain an appeal to the client by name. Recipient lists should be generated automatically in accordance with the specified criteria at the time the campaign is launched. It should be possible to indicate specific information on a specific proposal, a specific user.

Note:The SMTP protocol, by which letters are sent on the Internet, does NOT involve delivery reports and recipient actions with a letter: opening, deleting, marking as spam. The good news is that by default there are reports of delivery problems (bounced email). If no problems have occurred, it is possible to assert with certainty that the letter has been received. There is also a way to track the opening of a letter. Unfortunately, this method has its limitations.

To configure Email mailings in Siebel, in addition to the basic set of software modules (Siebel Web Server, Siebel Application Server (s), Siebel Gateway, Siebel Database), you will need to install additional ones:

SMTP Relay Server - any mail server that can send emails, and which has the ability to interact without authentication.
Email Sending Daemon (ESD) - a utility that allows you to collect letters from a template and a specific data set and sends them to SMTP Relay Server.
Bounced Handling Daemon (BHD) is a utility that can receive and parse reports of delivery problems (bounced email).
Click Through Daemon (CTD) is a utility that can process HTTP requests (click through, resource request). We will need this thing to record information about opening a letter and about clicking on links inside this letter.
Network Gateway - a router on a server that is accessible on the one hand from the Internet, and on the other hand can forward certain requests to the company's internal network. Its configuration is necessary in order to forward bounced email (port 25) to the server with BHD and broadcast HTTP requests (port 80) to the server with CTD.
Business Intelligence (BI) is a tool that allows you to define complex criteria for selecting data by customers. Within our infrastructure, BI has two tasks: segmenting the client base for a marketing campaign, creating a list with data for substitution in the body of the letter. BI can take data for these operations both from the Siebel database and from the repository.

Basic setting

If until this moment marketing campaigns in Siebel were not used at all on the project, then you must do the following:

run the necessary server components
docs.oracle.com/cd/E14004_01/books/MKTG_InstallAdmin/mktg_installadmin_installmktg4.html#wp186724
activate marketing Workflow
docs.oracle.com/cd/E14004_01/books/MKTG_InstallAdmin/mktg_installadmin_installmktg5.html#wp186830
configure integration with BI (I assume that it is already installed and working)
docs.oracle.com/cd/E14004_01/books/MKTG_InstallAdmin/mktg_installadmin_installmktg7.html#wp224347

Install and configure Siebel Email Marketing Server core components

ESD, BHD, and CTD are collectively called Siebel Email Marketing Server. Distributions for these utilities can be downloaded from support.oracle.com, section “Patches & Updates”

Note: At the time of writing, the latest build was number 629.
Note: JDK6 must be installed on the target servers for these components to work.

Email Sending Daemon

To configure ESD, you must make the following changes to the esd.properties file.

At startup, the ESD logs in to Siebel to verify that it has a license to use the Siebel Marketing Server. To do this, he uses Web Service technology:

esd.handler.webservice.url=http://sbl81srvr01/eai_enu/start.swe?SWEExtSource=WebService&SWEExtCmd=Execute&WSSOAP=1 
esd.handler.webservice.username=ESD
esd.handler.webservice.password=ESD

In order for ESD to be able to collect letters, it needs a list with recipient data and a letter template. Siebel will upload this data as files to its file system, which the ESD should have access to:
```
esd.mountPoint=c:/Siebel/fs
```
ESD must know the name of the mail server (SMTP Server) through which letters will be sent:
```
esd.mailServers=sbl81srvr01
```

Running ESD is easiest as a service. Window has a special installer for this: install-win32-service.bat.

Note: Another action that must be performed before starting ESD: in the esd-axis2.xml file, comment out lines of the form:

chunked.

This is due to the error that is described at support.oracle.com.

If everything is configured correctly, then after starting in the logs (esd.log) you can see the following:

2015-08-26 17:21:06,362 [Thread-1] INFO  OnPremiseAppListener ESD is licensed.

Now you need to tell Siebel where the ESD is located in order to give it mailing tasks. To do this, you need:

go to the Administration - Web Services -> Outbound Web Services screen
find a service named SendMailingService
for Service Port named SendMailing, you need to specify the address of the server where the ESD is deployed

Now the Siebel ‒ ESD bundle should work and Siebel will be able to set tasks for the ESD to send emails.

Bounce handling daemon

To configure BHD, you need to make the following changes to the bhd.properties file.

Siebel Web Service access settings, through which BHD will check for licenses at startup and send information about all received bounced email:

BhdModule.handler.webservice.url = http://sbl81srvr01/eai_enu/start.swe?SWEExtSource=WebService&SWEExtCmd=Execute&WSSOAP=1
BhdModule.handler.webservice.username = BHD
BhdModule.handler.webservice.password = BHD

The port number that BHD will listen to and wait for a bounced email:
```
SMTPD.port=8096
```
It is better not to use the standard port 25, it needs administrator rights. The easiest way to set a port is in the range of 8000 - 8900.

If everything is configured correctly, then after starting in the logs (bhd.log), you can see the following:

2015-08-26 18:20:48,823 [main] INFO  OnPremiseMain BHD is licensed.
….
2015-08-26 18:20:49,104 [main] INFO  SMTPDaemon started; waiting for connections

Click-Through Daemon

To configure CTD, you must make changes to the ctd.properties file

Parameters for accessing Siebel's Web Service, through which CTD will check for a license at startup and send information to Siebel about all HTTP requests that will be generated when the recipient works with the letter (following links, requesting pictures)
```
ctd.webservice.url = http://sbl81srvr01/eai_enu/start.swe?SWEExtSource=WebService&SWEExtCmd=Execute&WSSOAP=1
ctd.webservice.username = CTD
ctd.webservice.password = CTD 
```

This utility can also be installed as a Windows service using the install-win32-service.bat script.

If everything is configured correctly, then after starting in the logs (ctd.log), you can see the following:

2015-08-26 18:31:49,365 [Thread-1] INFO  OnPremiseAppListener CTD is licensed.
…
2015-08-26 18:31:49,443 [Thread-1] INFO  Registry Options configured for service: class com.siebel.sem.ctd.integrated.CTDRegisterWebService
2015-08-26 18:31:49,443 [Thread-1] INFO  Registry Registering [urn:xml-initialize-ctd] with class [com.siebel.sem.ctd.integrated.CTDRegisterWebService]

Note: In the folder c: \ Siebel \ EMS \ ctd \ webapps \ ctd \ enu \ there are page templates that are used if the recipient decides to unsubscribe from the newsletter. They can be modified in accordance with the corporate identity of the company.

Siebel Setup

In order to use BHD and CTD, you must configure at the Siebel level. On the Administration - Marketing  Servers screen, you need to find the Email Marketing Server entry and, for the BHD and CTD parameters, the name of the server that acts as a gateway between the Internet and the local network of the enterprise.

It is important to specify the domain name, not the IP address. In addition, this domain name must be resolved from the Internet. If these conditions are not met, then external mail services will interpret your letters as spam.

Network gateway

On the router, to which bounced email and HTTP requests will come, packet forwarding must be configured from the external network interface to the internal:

forward packets that come to port 25 of the external interface to the server where BHD is deployed, to the port that it listens to;
packets that come to port 80 of the external interface should be forwarded to the server where CTD is deployed, to the port that it listens to.

It is important to use these ports on the external interface, otherwise there will be problems with external mail services.

Test Newsletter

Letters that have already been sent cannot be returned back. Therefore, before sending, you always need to do newsletters to some predefined test addresses. To do this, you can create a fixed list through List Management and attach it to the marketing campaign that will be used.
In order to verify that we are all set up correctly, we need to do the following:

create a test mailing list in List Management
create a test offer (Offer) and define an Email treatment for it (Treatment)
create a marketing campaign, associate it with a test list and Email address
launch this marketing campaign

In the following article we will dwell in more detail on the creation of Email-addresses. This is where a lot of interesting things happen.

Tags:

siebel crm email marketing