Read the story behind it…

The UBX Toolkit was a new approach to a unique problem. That sometimes meant that it was difficult for customers to understand it’s value. We needed to fix that.

Marketers use Universal Behavior Exchange (UBX) to exchange customer data between cloud-based marketing applications without a complicated software integration. However, this capability is not available to marketers who use so-called on-premises marketing apps – software installed on a corporate network behind a secure firewall. To access that untapped market, the UBX Toolkit was developed to install behind a firewall to enable on-premises apps to connect with UBX.

This example presents a high-level overview of the UBX Toolkit to help a general audience of marketers, managers, and IT specialists to quickly understand the benefits, requirements, and resources associated with this new data exchange tool.

Audience:
System administrators who install, configure, and operate the software.
Marketers who use UBX to share customer data between various marketing applications.
Managers who need to authorize purchases.

Noteworthy: The budget was tight when we were developing UBX and the UBX Toolkit. We did not have access to graphic designers, nor the budget for graphics software like Adobe Illustrator. However, I was convinced that diagrams would be critical to explaining how to work with the toolkit. To work around the problem I turned to an open source graphics tool, Inkscape. With Inkscape, I was able to use IBM-approved icons and a bit of creativity to illustrate the content associated with the UBX Toolkit.

Tools:

• IBM DITA, for authoring
• Inkscape, for illustrations
• Adobe Acrobat Pro, for reviews

---

What is UBX?
Universal Behavior Exchange (UBX) is a hosted service that enables separate marketing applications to exchange data about customers (audiences) and their behaviors (events). UBX end users (marketers) can exchange audience and event data between marketing applications without the need for costly software integrations or repeated requests to corporate IT departments.

What is the UBX Toolkit?
The ”toolkit” is a collection of scripts that administrators run to call APIs that prepare, upload, and download data that describe customers (audiences) and their behaviors (events), as provided by various marketing software applications.