This chapter describes the tasks involved in deploying (or launching) online dialogs and managing them once they are running. Once a dialog is live, there are a variety of management tasks you can perform on the dialog.
This chapter contains the following sections:
Understanding Dialog Statuses
Deploying Dialogs
Managing Live Dialogs
Moving Dialogs
A dialog’s status determines who can access the dialog and what can be done to it, such as making changes or testing the dialog.
Dialogs have two versions: the Live version and the Design version. The Design version is the one you work on; you can make changes to it without affecting anything visible to your customers. The Live version is the one that your customers see: once your Design version is set up the way you want it, you move it to Live so it is available to be seen by customers. Your Design version remains, and you can still make changes to it without changing the Live version.
Online Marketing uses the following dialog statuses:
Dialog State |
Description |
In Design |
When you initially create a dialog, its state is In Design. In this state, you can create and modify all the components of the dialog: documents, flow, and so forth. You can also generate the URLs to be used for any Web Link Promo or External Event Trigger actions in your dialog. While in this state, the dialog’s web pages cannot be accessed by the outside world. From the In Design state, you can change the dialog’s state to Test and Live. You can also change directly to Archived if the dialog has never been Live. |
Test |
The Test state allows you to try out your flow to make sure it works as intended. While a dialog is in this state, you cannot make changes to the dialog or any of its documents. From the Test state, you can change the dialog’s state to In Design or Live. |
Live |
Placing a dialog in Live state deploys the dialog. This starts the dialog’s flow, and makes the web pages of your dialog available to the outside world. If you want to change a dialog while it is in Live state, you must first place the dialog in In Design state. From the Live state, you can change the dialog’s state to Broadcast Hold, Paused, and Complete. |
Broadcast Hold |
Placing a dialog in the Broadcast Hold state pauses all outbound actions and leaves the dialog’s web pages accessible to the outside world. If you want to change a dialog while it is in Broadcast Hold, place the dialog in the In Design state and you can make changes to outbound and inbound actions of the In Design version. Changes you make will take effect once you move the In Design version to Live . From the Broadcast Hold state, you can change the dialog’s state to Paused, Live, and Complete. |
Paused |
Placing a dialog in Paused state pauses all actions, so that you can make significant changes to the dialog and stage the dialog before redeploying it. In this state, none of the dialog’s web pages can be accessed by the outside world. To make changes to the dialog, place it in the In Design state first. From the Paused state, you can change the dialog’s state to Broadcast Hold, Live, and Complete. |
Complete |
Placing a dialog in Complete state stops the dialog. The dialog is no longer Live and cannot be redeployed. All of the data gathered by the dialog is still available to CRM Analytics. If there is currently a Design version of the dialog at this point, all the changes will be reverted such that there is only one Complete version. |
Archived |
Placing a dialog in Archived status makes no functional change; it simply provides a status that you can use to search for dialogs that are no longer used. |
The Dialog Status section of the Dialog Designer page displays a graphical representation of the statuses of your dialog's Live and Design versions.
Note. If the dialog has never been Live, the Dialog Status section will not distinguish between the Live and Design versions; only one row without a row header will appear in the Dialog Status grid.
Live Version |
This row displays current status information about the Live version of the dialog. |
Design Version |
This row displays current status information about the Design version of the dialog. You can make changes to the Design version without affecting the Live version. All edits to the dialog are done in this version. |
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Indicates that the dialog has passed through this status. |
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This button moves through the grid cells to visually indicate the dialog's current status. The link next to the button indicates the action you can perform at that point in the dialog. For example, if the dialog is in Live status, click the View link to view it. When viewing the Live dialog, click the link to view the Design version. |
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In the Live version, buttons appear for statuses in which you can place the dialog from the current status. For example, click the Pause button to place the dialog in Paused status. In the Design version, only the Test and Live buttons will appear. Note that if the Live version is currently in Paused or Broadcast Hold state, moving the Design version to Live will remove the Live version from these states and set it to Live. |
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This button moves through the grid cells in the In Design version, visually indicating the dialog's current status. |
Revert to Live |
If you have made changes to the dialog in the Design version, click this button to return it to the same state as the Live version. |
When changing a dialog’s status to Live, Broadcast Hold, or Paused, the audiences associated with the dialog must be in either the Approved or Committed status.
When changing the dialog’s status to Test, if all associated audiences are of type External, the audiences must be in status Approved or Committed. If an Internal audience exists, the audience you chose from the Audience list for the testing must be Approved or Committed.
Once a dialog has been activated, you will only have access to audiences in the Approved or Committed statuses.
See Also
PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 9.1 Marketing Applications PeopleBook
Selecting Audiences for a Dialog
Before you activate your dialog, there are three tasks that you should complete:
Check your dialog to ensure that there are no problems.
Test the dialog design to ensure that it performs as intended.
Generate the URLs of any web link promos in your dialog. This allows you to provide the URL to the person implementing the web link promo prior to deploying the dialog.
After you have performed these tasks, you can activate the dialog, which simply involves changing the state of your dialog to Live.
See Going Live with an Online Dialog.
Before activating your dialog, you must first check your dialog’s integrity to ensure that there are no problems. Online Marketing includes the Dialog Check that checks for a variety of mistakes in a dialog. This tool helps you correct some basic problems that can prevent your dialog from running properly. The tool checks four areas of the dialog: target audiences, documents, and flow.
The results of the tests are indicated by four colors: green, yellow, blue, and red. Green indicates pass, Yellow indicates a warning, Blue indicates a notice, and Red indicates an error that will prevent your dialog from being activated.
When the tool indicates any warnings, notices or errors, it also creates a report that describes the problems found. Before activating your dialog, you must correct all errors indicated, and should ensure that the warnings are acceptable to you. Warnings indicate a potential problem, but do not prevent the dialog from running. Notices indicate that an email document’s individual frequency management actions have been modified.
The dialog check performs the following tests:
Target Audience |
Checks whether all target audiences included in the dialog are actually used in the flow. |
Document Basics |
Checks whether all documents have been used in the flow, that items within the documents have been properly defined, that web documents with entry fields also contain a submit button, and that templates exist and have appropriate tags. |
Merge Content |
Checks whether all required data specified for the object is present. |
Profile Choices |
Performs a comparison between a choice document element and the profile choice element that it was based upon. If a corresponding profile choice does not exist in the document choices, it is flagged as absent. If an inactive choice exists in the profile but not in the document’s version, it is flagged as active. |
Action Basics |
Checks whether the flow is properly structured. |
Referenced Documents |
Checks whether document references in a flow actually contain documents, and that each On Submit task contains a web document with a Submit button. |
Referenced Target Audiences |
Checks whether a target audience is specified in the flow wherever it is needed (for broadcast email and web link promos). |
Action Dependencies |
Checks whether there are any task dependencies in a flow, and, if so, checks whether the dependencies are met. |
Email Fields |
Checks whether the format of any email addresses is correct. |
Referenced Profile Fields |
Checks whether the appropriate condition fields are filled out. |
Referenced Custom Actions |
Checks for required custom action keywords and also verifies that parameter/value pairs, if present, conform to proper format. |
Queue Management |
Checks email queue management settings against the global default settings and displays a notice if they are different. |
To check a dialog:
From the Dialog tab of the dialog you want to check, click the Check button.
The Dialog Check page is displayed.
Click either Run All Checks or you can run an individual test by clicking the test's link.
The selected tests run, and the results are indicated by a colored icon:
Green indicates that the test was passed.
Yellow indicates a warning.
Red indicates an error that will prevent your dialog from being activated.
Blue indicates a notice that the email's queue management settings are different from the global settings.
If any warnings, notices or errors are indicated, they are displayed on the right side of the Dialog Check window, along with an explanation for each.
If desired, export this information to an Excel file by clicking the Export button.
Fix any problems indicated in the report. You must fix red errors. You are not required to fix yellow warnings to continue, but you should ensure that they are acceptable to you.
Run the tests again, and repeat the process if other problems appear.
Validation (with no errors, although warnings are permissible) is required before a dialog can be deployed.
If your dialog uses any Web Link Promo or External Event Trigger actions, you need to generate the URLs for these actions so that you can provide the URLs to the person implementing the web link promos on web sites or elsewhere.
This feature generates the special URLs that contain the location of the web page (Standalone Page or Landing Page) and identifies the target audience that all respondents using this URL will belong to. Online Marketing generates a different URL for each audience or trigger and web page combination. For example if a dialog uses one web link promo with two audiences, then Online Marketing generates two different URLs.
Since a dialog uses different audiences while being tested, the URLs generated from the Testing state will not access the web pages of a live dialog. The URLs to be used with a live dialog can be generated either before or after testing the dialog, from one of the following states: In Design, Broadcast Hold, Paused, or Live.
If you generate the URLs before testing the dialog, depending on the changes you make to the dialog after testing, you may need to regenerate the URLs. For example, you must regenerate the URLs if you change a target audience or Landing Page in the dialog.
Note. Placing a web link promo or external event trigger on a web site requires human interaction, such as a person placing a banner ad on a web site.
To generate the URLs for Web Link Promos and External Event Triggers, click the Link Report button in the Dialog Designer toolbar.
The Link Report for the dialog is displayed.
Link To |
The action to which the URL points. |
Link From |
The action in which the link is initiated. |
Audience |
The audience to which the link is directed. |
URL |
The URL link generated for the document. Each of the URLs specified must be provided to the person handling the placement of that web link promo or External Event Trigger. |
View URL |
This hyperlink is available for External Event Triggers connected to Standalone Pages or Landing Pages, but not when connected to a Single Email action. |
You can export the Link Report to an Excel file by clicking the Download button.
Note. You cannot use the link generated in a testing report as a link in your live dialog.
You should test your dialog to ensure that it was properly designed and works as expected. Since dialogs often run over a period of several months, Online Marketing allows you to create a condensed version of your dialog so that you can test all of its components. By condensing the time period and reducing the size of your target audience, you may be able to test an entire dialog in a matter of hours.
To test an online dialog:
In the Dialog Status Controller, click the Test button.
The Test Dialog page appears.
Select a test audience. (The Select Test Audience group box is only available if the dialog has one or more Date/Time Triggers.)
You can select from a list of internal audiences that have a status of Committed or Approved. A test audience can be fixed or dynamic, and must match the SetID associated with the dialog. Fixed audiences with counts greater than the error threshold are automatically excluded from the search list. In the case of dynamic audiences, the count is generated at the time the audience is selected, and if it exceeds the error threshold an error message is generated. If you select an audience with a count greater than the warning threshold, a warning displays and you can choose to continue or cancel and select another audience.
When testing, you only specify one testing audience, regardless of the number of audiences in your actual dialog. All broadcast emails are sent to the same testing audience
Note. Since people in your company may not normally be part of your profile database, you may need to have your Online Marketing Administrator help add these people to the database. Individuals entered via testing dialogs are not removed—you can include testing contacts the audience for your online dialog.
Choose a subject line prefix to be inserted in front of the subject for each broadcast email, so that your testing audience is not confused when they receive the broadcast email (for example, you could insert the words “Dialog Test:” in front of the subject). This step is optional, and only appears if the dialog contains emails.
Choose options for the timing of the test. If the dialog contains Date/Time Triggers, both the Immediate and Compressed timing options are available. If the dialog has only External Event Triggers and no single emails with delays, the Compressed timing option is not available.
If you choose Immediate, all activities and triggers kick off in five minutes, and delays are adjusted to five minutes. (You can modify the default minimum delay in the Global Options settings.)
If you choose Compressed, you must provide a compression percentage. The default is 25%. The Compressed option causes the dialog to execute within the chosen percentage of the original timeframe. (For example, if the duration of the dialog is 4 days and you choose 25%, the dialog's timeframes are compressed so it will finish executing in one day.)
After you select Compressed and click OK, a page is displayed to show you the approximate duration of the test.
Click OK to proceed with the test or click Cancel to go back and adjust the compression percentage.
Once the testing dialog is created, Online Marketing deploys the dialog immediately to the testing audience. Even in dialogs where you have set a date to send your first broadcast email, Online Marketing will reset that date to the current date and time, and send the first broadcast email to your testing audience immediately. This is true even when the first date in the dialog has already passed.
If the dialog uses a Web Link Promo action, you can still test your dialog from the Testing state. You must generate a URL for the Web Link Promo from the Testing state by creating a Link Report. Using this URL you can test the dialog.
If your dialog contains repeating triggers, you can set the minimum frequency in which the repeat iterations are executed. The default minimum frequency used for testing is 60 minutes; it can be modified in Global Options.
Note. Because a dialog uses different audiences while being tested, the URLs generated from the Testing state will not access the web pages of a live dialog.
See Going Live with an Online Dialog.
See Generating URLs for Web Link Promos and External Event Triggers.
You deploy an online dialog by changing the dialog’s state to Live. Before you do this, you must run the Online Dialog Check to ensure that the dialog does not have any errors. Once your dialog passes all the tests, you should place the dialog in the Test state to test that the dialog works as expected.
When you deploy a dialog, Online Marketing performs the following tasks:
Automatically checks the dialog for errors. If it finds any, the Dialog Check page is displayed with the errors. You will need to correct the problem before being able to deploy the dialog. The Dialog Check page only displays messages for errors; it does not automatically indicate warnings. Online Marketing only indicates warnings when you explicitly run the Online Dialog Check.
Creates the document data storage tables. These tables contain all the responses to the dialog web pages, and statistics associated with the dialog. This information is accessible through CRM Analytics, and exists in the database until the dialog is deleted.
Informs the Online Marketing Dialog Server to clear the server cache so that all new tables are available to the web server.
Once your dialog is Live, anyone can access its web pages. If your dialog uses both a broadcast email and a Web Link Promo action (such as a banner ad), anyone seeing the URL can access the dialog, even if it is weeks before the broadcast email is sent out. Depending on your dialog this may or may not be a problem.
If you have associated your dialog to an activity in a Marketing campaign, you will also want to change that activity’s status to executing.
To deploy a dialog, click the Live button in the Deployment Status controller. If there are errors in the dialog, you are prompted to run Dialog Check and fix the errors before you are able to activate the dialog.
There are a variety of ways that you can manage your live online dialogs, including:
Handling email bounces
Making changes to a live dialog
Stopping a dialog
Deleting a dialog
Whenever you create an email document, you must specify a mailbox for the Bounced field. Any mailboxes used in this field must first be defined through Mailbox Setup.
Note. Although the mailboxes used for Bounced mail can be personal email addresses, it is strongly recommended that you set up email addresses dedicated for this purpose. Due to the number of emails that will be sent out, the fact that emails are deleted from the mailbox, and the potential for large numbers of bounces, it is best to use addresses created specifically for these purposes.
Any emails sent by Online Marketing that bounce are returned to the Bounced mailbox. Online Marketing monitors this mailbox, logs every email that is returned to it, and then deletes the bounced emails.
Online Marketing determines whether an email received in the bounced mailbox is a bounce by checking the From address and the subject for specific keywords. These keywords are specified in the parameters bounceMailFromFilter and bounceMailSubjectFilter. You can also specify an email address where all non-bounce emails received in the Bounced mailbox are forwarded. This is specified in the parameter bounceForward.
You can view statistics about the number of bounced emails through CRM Analytics and the Dialog Performance Forecast ACE report. If you want to see the email addresses that bounced, you can set up the mailbox to forward all emails it receives to another email address, prior to deleting them from the mailbox. (You do this through Mailbox Setup.) However, you might not want to do this if the target audience for the dialog is very large. For example, with an audience of 100,000 contacts, a 2% bounce rate would send 2,000 emails to the specified email address.
See Also
PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 9.1 Supplemental Installation Guide
Once a dialog is Live, you may decide that you need to make certain changes to the dialog. This section describes the types of changes you can make to the In Design version of a Live dialog, and how those changes can affect the dialog and your data.
Warning! Be very careful if you decide to make changes once a dialog has gone Live. It is possible to severely damage your dialog and the data collected.
This section provides information on:
When changes take effect
Restrictions on changes
How changes affect dialogs
Placing a dialog in Broadcast Hold
Pausing a dialog
Reactivating a dialog
When Changes Take Effect
To make changes while a dialog is Live, you set the dialog to In Design and make changes without affecting your Live version. The changes take effect when you change your In Design dialog to Live. You can pause a dialog to test it, but it is not required.
Modifications you make to a dialog only affect actions that are triggered or scheduled after the change takes effect (when the In Design version is changed to Live).
For example, you might have a reminder email that is scheduled to be sent one month after a respondent submits a seminar registration. Changing the reminder date to one week only affects respondents to the dialog after the change takes effect. Respondents who submitted their registration before the change takes effect will still get the reminder one month from the day they submitted it.
Restrictions on Changes
Once your dialog has gone Live, you can make the following changes:
General changes, such as dialog name and description.
Changes to target audiences.
Document changes.
Changes to the dialog flow (outbound and inbound actions).
How Changes Affect Dialogs
Online Marketing allows you to make changes to the In Design version of an active dialog . However some changes can have unintended consequences, such as causing dialog results to be misleading, damaging data already gathered, or confusing respondents already interacting with the dialog. The following table describes a variety of changes to an already active dialog that can cause problems.
Warning! This is not a comprehensive list of all possible damaging changes. It is intended to help you understand how changes can affect your dialog.
Dialog component |
Change |
Emails |
Deleting a Broadcast Email action or a Follow-up Email action. Deleting an email action before the email is sent prevents it from being sent, even if it is already scheduled. This also applies to Broadcast Email actions deleted while Online Marketing is sending the emails to the target audience. Deleting a Broadcast Email action also prevents you from seeing those results in CRM Analytics. Editing an email document (while in any state). You can edit a document used in an email action at any time. The change will be reflected the next time the email action is executed. If you make changes to an email document used in a Broadcast Email action that has already started being sent out, the changes will not be included unless the Mailcaster is restarted (the Online Marketing Mailcaster handles sending all Online Marketing emails to the SMTP server). This is the only way to force a Broadcast Email action to restart. However, any emails already sent out will not be resent. |
Choice Questions |
Changes to Choice questions are allowed . Adding questions to a document: When a new question is added to a document, a “blank” value is stored in that document’s data table for each respondent who already submitted data for that document. The “null” indicates that no answer was supplied for the question. This is how unanswered questions are marked, so the CRM Analytics data might be misleading because Online Marketing does not automatically indicate the date when the respondent submitted the page. (Of course, you can do this yourself by using a hidden date field.) It may seem that many people chose not to answer a question, when actually the question was added late. Changing the number of choices presented for a multiple choice question: Changing the number of choices in a question can cause the results to be misleading because the same choices will not have been available to all respondents. Changing the text of a choice question in a document, but leaving the choices unchanged: Although this does not damage the dialog, you must be very careful when changing the question, because only the new question is listed in CRM Analytics. If you change the question, the results can be misleading. For example, suppose the following: the original question is “What is your favorite color” and you change it to “What is your least favorite color”. If prior to the change, 20,000 respondents selected red as their favorite color, and after the change 10,000 respondents selected red as their least favorite color, then the results will show 30,000 people selected red as their least favorite color, which is entirely misleading. Removing questions from a document: Online Marketing never deletes columns from a document data table. If a question is removed from the document definition, any new respondents will have a “null” value placed in the column associated with the deleted question. However, since the question has been removed, there is no way to view or analyze the data originally stored in that column. Further, since the column still exists, you are unable to use that question’s name again. Warning! The exception to this is if the removed field is required. If it is required, the insert will fail and could result in lost data for that insert. |
Date/Time Triggers |
These changes to Date/Time triggers are allowed.
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Landing Pages |
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Repeating Triggers |
These changes are allowed :
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Web Documents |
Selecting a different document to be used in a web page . When you change the document that is associated with a web page action, any links to the original web page generated by the Link Report will remain intact. However, merge content and cross dialog links from other Online Marketing web documents will need to be reset. |
Decision Point |
Modifying an existing Decision Point can have a serious effect on the overall behavior of the flow. You should not do this unless absolutely necessary. |
Placing a Dialog in Broadcast Hold
When a dialog is placed in Broadcast Hold, all outbound actions in the dialog are suspended, except for broadcast email tasks that are already ready to be mailed.
If the broadcast email task has already begun de-duping (removing duplicates from its target audiences), the calculations are not interrupted. Once Online Marketing completes this task, the broadcast email will be suspended.
If the Broadcast Hold occurs after de-duping has completed (when the broadcast email task is either queued, waiting to be mailed, or while Online Marketing is sending the broadcast emails) the task completes before the dialog is placed in hold state. The only way to stop the emails from being sent is to have your Administrator restart the Mailcaster (the Online Marketing Mailcaster handles sending all Online Marketing emails to the SMTP server).
Actions that have been scheduled but not yet executed are prevented from executing while the dialog is paused.
While in Broadcast Hold, the inbound actions continue to be available to all respondents to the dialog.
To broadcast hold a dialog, click the Hold button in the Deployment Status controller.
When a dialog is placed in Paused state, all actions in the dialog are suspended except for broadcast email tasks that are already ready to be mailed.
If the broadcast email task has already begun de-duping (removing duplicates from its target audiences), the calculations are not interrupted. Once Online Marketing completes this task, it will be suspended.
If the Pause occurs after de-duping has completed (when the broadcast email task is either queued, waiting to be mailed, or while Online Marketing is sending the broadcast emails) the task completes before the dialog is placed in Paused state. The only way to stop the emails from being sent is to have your Administrator restart the Mailcaster (the Online Marketing Mailcaster handles sending all Online Marketing emails to the SMTP server).
Actions that have been scheduled but not yet executed are prevented from executing while the dialog is paused.
Any respondent who attempts to access a web page or attempts to submit a web page receives a “temporarily out of order” error message as specified in the PageNotFoundMessage and PageNotFoundURL parameters. Online Marketing has no way of tracking any respondents that were interacting with the dialog at the time it was paused.
To pause a dialog, click the Pause button in the Deployment Status controller.
When a paused dialog is reactivated, the execution of actions proceed according to the normal schedule, with one exception. Any action that was scheduled to execute while the dialog was paused starts executing immediately after the dialog is reactivated.
To reactivate a dialog, click the Live button in the Deployment Status controller to resume all scheduled jobs and resume serving web pages, or click the Broadcast Hold button to resume serving web pages without resuming bulk email jobs.
Certain dialogs lend themselves to specific end dates. For example, with a sweepstakes dialog, after a certain date you may not want respondents to continue entering the sweepstakes.
Stopping a dialog ends the execution of the dialog and respondents can no longer access any of its web pages. However all of the data are still accessible through CRM Analytics.
Note. Although dialogs can have start and end dates, these dates are only used for informational purposes and do not automatically start or stop the dialog.
Warning! Once a dialog is stopped, it cannot be reactivated. If you want to be able to reactivate a dialog, you should pause a dialog instead of stopping it.
To stop a dialog, click the Complete button in the Deployment Status controller. All scheduled jobs are deleted from the schedulers and web pages are no longer served.
When you change a dialog's status to Complete, a check is performed to ensure that no dialog or nested dialog edits have been done since the last time the dialog was live. (In other words, a check is performed to determine whether the Live copy and the Edit copy are the same.) If there is a difference, a message displays informing you that the Live and Edit dialogs are different, and that if you choose to continue, the Edit version will be overwritten by the Live version. You are given the option to copy the Edit version as a new dialog if you do not want to lose your changes.
From the Complete status, you can change a dialog's status to Archived by clicking the Archive button in the Deployment Status controller. Though no change occurs as a result of this status move, you can use the Archived state to filter or search for dialogs that are no longer in use. You cannot delete a dialog from the system.
Warning! Do not place a dialog in Archived status unless you are sure you do not want to use it again.
When running Online Marketing with integrated applications that need to access other CRM data, it is important to be able to develop dialogs in one location and then move them to a production environment once they have been completed and tested. To do this, you use a utility called the Dialog Mover.
Refer to the chapter that discusses importing and exporting online dialogs for more information.
See Importing and Exporting Dialogs and Dialog Survey Reports.