eMarketing Suite G8

The eMarketing Suite G8 was released 2008-11-21 and is a technical release with several things rebuilt and a set of new technical features.

Navigation Predictor

To accommodate the ever larger customers that chose the eMarketing Suite the Navigation Predictor has been rebuilt from scratch. The data uploads are now 5 times faster and it uses one fifth of the RAM. This is on a data set of 5 million transactions using the file retriever.

Customer Interaction Broker

The CIB has a new entity, Questions and Answers. The Q&A allows any user to post questions about a product and other users to answer the questions. A user can ask a maximum of one question per product and a user can only answer a specific question once. Also new is:

• safe transactional saving of CIB data
• arbitrary top-lists on any attribute
• add any property such as image, description and so on to users
• get all reviews, lists, questions and answers created the last x days
• data is stored more efficiently
• review and list title are not also subjected to the profanity filter

Social Search Optimizer and Landing Page Optimizer

The SSO and the LPO now allows setting a minimum number of times a search phrase or an adword has to be related to a product for it to qualify as a recommendation.

Collaborative Searcher

CS now supports dynamic alphabets. Prior to G8 the CS was limited to the English Alphabet. Now alphabets of any size and any characters can be supported.

Administration

The Administration Interfaces (AWS and PHP) have been replaced by the Java based Control Panel.
The Control Panel is designed for multiple instance administration and is available in English, German and French. It automatically updates itself as new versions become available.

New Metric

The metric tool built into the eMarketing Suite has been rebuilt. The old A/B testing was not accurate on smaller data sets.

Message Handling System

The Message Handling System got a lot of attention in the G8 development with focus on logging and encoding.

There are now four types of loggers:

• File logger - logs to file
• NT Event Log - logs to the Windows Event Log
• Syslog - logs to the sys log on Unix and Linux
• MailLog - logs to mail

Any message handler - listener, command file loader, task, ... - can have any number of error loggers and a maximum of one event logger.

A new message handler has been added, Reports. This enables any eMarketing command to be executed as a schedule task and the response sent as a HTML-mail.

The AWS web server has been removed. Use the AJAX server instead which has been rebuilt on top of the popular open source web server Jetty.

A help command has been added which allows you to get help in any interface on any method. The help command supports wild cards.

Nuts and Bolts

The directory structure of the eMarketing Suite has been cleaned up and restructured to better support multiple instance set-ups.

All data uploads are now completely seamless.

The file retriever now support delimiters of any unicode character or any length. It lets you manually define which encoding to use, supports BOMs and supports uploading from gzip files.

The eMarketing Suite can now be set up as a Windows service out of the box.

A new tool has been added, Heartbeat. This tool monitors one or several instances and sends an e-mail if an instance stops responding and another e-mail when and if the instance goes up again. The Hearbeat tool also has a web page that gives an overview of the monitored instances. The Hearbeat is independent of the eMarketing Suite and should preferably be placed on a separate machine.