Read the story behind it…

eMessage could be confusing. It was an early example of what is now referred to as a “hybrid cloud” product. Marketing users and their IT departments sometimes struggled to understand how its various components interacted, where the data went, and the overall sequence of actions. It was a fun problem to attack.

eMessage was an enterprise-grade email service platform for marketers. As a hybrid product, some system components were installed on a local network behind a firewall (known as on-premises software) and other components were provided as hosted online services.  At the time, no one else had anything quite like it.

To address these questions, I created a single short topic that presented the entire eMessage model in a single diagram. A lot of information – gathered in one place – to better explain functions, relationships, and workflow. It served as a high-level introduction to help jump start adoption of this new way of delivering a marketing email solution.

Audience: Email marketers and system administrators who support them.

Noteworthy:
My early attempts to use text to explain the operation of eMessage resulted in some rather long PDFs. The flow was difficult to follow and did not adequately convey the interconnectedness of the product. I decided that an infographic – even a complicated one with 11 callouts – was a better approach.

I used the open source illustration app, Inkscape, to create the diagram at the center of this topic. It was one of my early uses of open source graphics software. At the time, I was a self-taught illustrator and discovered that I could download company-approved icons and symbols from an IBM repository as SVG files that I could reconstruct in Inkscape to create the imagery that I needed. Tight budgets demanded a little resourcefulness.   

eMessage was originally released as a standalone on-premises application, updated annually. I was part of the effort in 2009 to radically change the product architecture around the hybrid approach. The development team also adopted a rapid-deployment strategy where online updates could be released every 4-6 weeks. It was a precursor to the Agile and Continuous Delivery strategies that are commonplace today.

Tools:

• IBM DITA tools for authoring
• Inkscape for graphic design
• Adobe Acrobat Pro for reviews

---

What is eMessage?
eMessage originally served as a strictly on-premises email service platform that was tightly integrated with the company’s flagship on-premises marketing campaign management product. The combination enabled marketers to build precisely targeted mailing lists and then engage that audience with highly personalized emails at scale, up to 1 million emails per hour.

The move to a hybrid architecture greatly simplified installation and maintenance costs for marketers. Much of the heavy lifting for email composition, delivery, and tracking was handled by IBM on the customer’s behalf in the hosted infrastructure. At the same time, the hybrid approach kept list composition, involving databases that contained customer personal data, safely behind the marketer’s security firewall.