This section includes some notes on setting up ATG Outreach to deploy to a cluster of production servers. It is strongly suggested that you review this section before starting the ATG Outreach installation procedures described in the rest of this chapter.
Before you start, please make sure that you have read the documentation listed below.
In the ATG Personalization Programming Guide:
Using Targeted E-Mail, in particular Distributing a Mailing across Multiple Servers
Configuring Scenarios
Distributing a Mailing across Multiple Servers
In the ATG Content Administration Programming Guide:
Understanding Deployment
Setting Up Deployment
The diagram below shows a sample multiple-server deployment configuration for ATG Outreach:
Note the following about this setup:
There should be only one process editor server in the production environment. Allowing more than one scenario server to run as a process editor server causes duplicate e-mails to be sent for each campaign.
You must deploy to all production servers, including e-mail rendering servers and the process editor server. To receive deployments from the ATG Outreach server, all servers in the production cluster must be configured as Publishing agents. For example, the HTTP request handling servers may only send out e-mail campaigns, but they must receive deployments so that e-mail management features work correctly.
The ATG Outreach Production/Staging module must be installed on all target servers.
You are not required to use dedicated servers for e-mail rendering, as shown in the diagram, but we recommend doing so if your ATG Outreach campaigns require you to send large numbers of e-mails.
Additional recommendations:
If you do not use dedicated servers for e-mail rendering, we strongly recommend that you use distributed e-mail services, which allow e-mails to be generated in batches by multiple threads. Using distributed e-mail greatly increases throughput, even if the rendering server is also servicing page requests. Distributed e-mail services are described in Distributing a Mailing across Multiple Servers in the ATG Personalization Programming Guide. (Note that distributed e-mail is required if you use dedicated e-mail rendering servers.)
Where possible, avoid having the process editor server handle HTTP requests. If you do include the process editor server in the request-handling cluster, be aware that when the campaign is started, the server will be under a higher load than usual, which will result in worse performance for users who have sessions on that instance. The higher load occurs because the process editor server initiates the scenario that generates the campaign. Depending on the elements in the campaign, the process editor server may be required to make changes to the profiles of a significant number of users.
If possible, test your campaign e-mail templates outside ATG Outreach (using the
URLHammer
utility, for example) to determine how long each mailing will take. Refer to the ATG Installation and Configuration Guide for information onURLHammer
.