Sales prospecting automation in IT architecture documentation

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[Music] first have a look at what ex connectors because I think it's important to get the terminology right here so ex Connect is it's not a server role it's a service layer that sits in between X DB and any client that wants to read write or search experience data using the X connect client API and when we say X DB we use it as a term for any services that process and store experience data so let's think of this as a separation of concerns that you shouldn't be accessing the data directly from X to B you should always be going through X connect all X connect API is are based on OData and is currently to services or endpoints fuel collection and search the connection and search both rely on the collection model which define all this fuel cell are types in the facets and events of the experience data you can of course extend this default collection model to add your own contact facets your own interaction facets or your custom events so the architecture of marketing automation this is a little bit simplified but it highlights the the important bits and pieces of what sim was important to a marketing automation and so when we are looking at marketing automation there's sort of two parts that are important there's the XM and the xpf part XM is the world you're used to and this is where we have to see and roll the CD roll and on the CEO role you have the campaign campaign designer or the marketing automation UI and on the CD you have the live event watcher look coming back to the live events in a while but on the xpf side we have X Kinect and part of X Kinect is the reference data service this is where all just a second time as I think you need part of X X Kinect is the reference date of service this is where all definitions are stored so whenever you save a campaign and marketing automation UI this is pushed to the reference data service which in turn pushes it to the reference data database we also have a couple of API endpoints namely marketing automation operations and reporting endpoints and we have an X connect plugin or service plugin which is responsible for validating than any data that is pushed to the collection is if it's of any interest to the marketing automation engine or not if it's a successful add or update of a interaction for example or a contact on a facet it will add a workout into the automation processing pool then the monitoring automation engine which is also brand-new this is constantly or constantly but impulses its processing any work items from the marketing automation processing pool the engine is a standalone application and it can run as a Windows service you can run it in a console application which is very useful for debugging you can also run it as an azure web drop if you prefer we also have a version of the engine running on the MA or marketing automation Operations endpoint in order to process live events then the final piece of the architecture which was added in 901 is the message bus and contrary to popular belief this is not part of exm this is part of the platform the message bus bills on Reba's which is an open source message post implementation it provides asynchronous communication of course and inside core it's so far right now only used by exm but it solves a general problem that psycho has had for many years which is how do you communicate between roles for example the CD and the CM or in this case the marketing automation engine and the CM as I said is only used by exam right now but you should definitely expect other parts of the platform to be using this as well and then your future right so I'm not we affair gotten a little bit of an overview of the architecture let's look at some of the ways that you can customize marketing automation we will be looking at three or two points view conditions and custom activities you can also change the configuration of marketing automation stated mentioned for example to scale up or out the engine you may also want to adjust the priority of work for example in order to let the and you know that your specific custom activities has to be higher of a higher priority than any other activities or vice versa or however you prefer really I won't be covering it and this talk though but everything is documented and you can of course just reach out if you need any help so conditions are rules the rules or the conditions are used in marketing automation for specifically the campaign entry trigger and listeners as well as decision points the conditions are using the new cycle framework rules engine which is also used by ex Connect and some of you are probably wondering why did we introduce this new rules engine we already had one why do I need to learn another API and the reason for that is again we we want things to be non-web we want want things to be omni-channel and the old rules engine was very tightly bound to the cycle kernel and the concentrate which the new one is not so the new engine is designed to be very portable it's very slim and very specific it does one thing and one thing only and on the right side of this slide you see a example of a very simple condition we have the DI rule execution context which is injected this is the context under which your who is running this context context allows you to extract certain facts about the about the execution and these facts are pieces of information that the host will inject for you and that might for example be a contact as we see in this case so in marketing mentioned we use these conditions in several places as you can see from this screenshot we use it in the entry trigger we use it in a listener in this case it's a goal triggered listener and finally we use it in a custom listener in this case so going back to the facts that I mentioned you can extract the contact as a fact of course when we need access to that in most cases but there are a few additional effects that you can extract namely the interaction one thing to make note of is that this is not present if the context under which you are executing this rule under is a facet being updated so make sure you check for that validate that the other fact that you can extract this te eye contact processing context this gives you access to the current enrollment and also any custom values in that enrollment custom values are just a dictionary of strings where you can get set this might be valuable later on for you you also have access to a couple of services the xtb context this is the ex connect client so you can read additional data from a connect if required just make sure that you pay attention or that you are careful about this because obviously querying X Connect requires a request an HTP request so you don't want to do this if you use this is an activity that is executed very often so be careful about that the same goes for the other services of course these are the definitions that economies and the reference data client definitions give you a gives you access to goals and events and the stuff within the market in control panel economies economies from the marketing control panel and finally the reference data client gives you access to any reference data right then the other piece which is only related to or only specific to marketing automation is the custom activity types so a custom activity is made up of two parts we have the campaign designer and the actual activity implementation so if you've refer back to the diagram of the architecture from earlier the campaign designer is what goes on the CM that's the UI app it it's what the marketer will see it's and it consists of in here all the front-end code and items and then we have the actual activity implementation which is just pure C sharp and it's just an implementation of AI activity and I'll get back to that in a bit so as far as the UI path is concerned similar to D all of the marketing automation the activities are built in angular marketing automation the UI part is the first component in cycle to be created in speak three and it's everything is based on angular yes it's the UI for any custom activities as this allows you to use any angular plugins that you want to it's everything is written in typescript so you can use NPM and web pack and whatnot whatever you prefer it is an example on the dock side on how to implement this and we are also and David stop me if I'm saying something I shouldn't but we're also looking at implementing some sample activities that will hopefully make it much easier than it already is and there are three things you need to be aware of one is before you need to do the the the front end bits but you also have to create some items specifically you have to create the actual activity definition then you need to define any parameters also as items and any parts that are the outgoing parts for this activity that's also explained in the documentation moving on to the back end part it's really rather simple you this one nuclear target xtb marketing automation core API then you implement the I activate II interface which requires you to implement a single method invoke and this gives you the icon type processing context injected there is as you can probably guess support for dependency injection and we have a several services already available for you to use but you can also add your own of course if you notice though any parameters of your activities they should be public properties with a public getter and setter for example in this case it's a string otherwise the properties will not be populated by the engine so in this case it's an activity where some message has been defined in the UI and you want that to be populated when you when the activity is invoked and finally the engine or the activity sorry needs to return what the engine should do next in this case it says return a success move and move it to the default path so the services that you have available are listed here you have the i-x to be context this gives you access to X Connect so again you can do operations on X connect reading all writing data even again think about the performance implications of this you have access to the definition manager factory giving access to marketing operations API we'll go back to the marketing operations API in a second and then you have the taxonomy manager provider the reference data client the eye condition evaluated evaluation service and the activity enrollment operations so the icon text processing interface this is the context of the actual enrollment so you can of course get access to the contact beam process the interaction being processed if any and you also have access to a dictionary again of custom values so if you have need to transfer some information or maybe a calculation from one activity to another you can use this dictionary to do so then the results of an activity should always be either a success moves they exit restart or failure move indicates that the enrollment should audit the intern should move the contact to the next stage of the plan stay that it should stay here for a while it's a good idea than to specify how long when you want this enrollment to be evaluated again exit means the contact will just be flush to Oryx remove from the campaign and restart means the contact will be enrolled in the start in the campaign finally failure indicates that something didn't go right and it should be rescheduled so once you've created your activity you need to register it as well and you do so in an XML or configuration file you need to do so in two places one is the ETS show the actual engine and the other is the version of your engine that is running on the marketing operations in point but it's the same configuration file great then web baby is and clients so as I mentioned earlier we have a couple of EAP I said you can use the operations API and the reporting API the operations API is used to interact with marketing automation and perform operations on contacts and enrollment the reporting API is used to report on the performance and state of a campaign both of these api's have synchronous and asynchronous versions of all methods and both of these API is have no dependency on the cycle kernel so they can be used anywhere you want they hosted on X connect if this is an is an XP 0 deployment and you have clients on the CM and the CD which is the same instance and an XP 0 but for an XP 1 deployment you have the API is hosted on a dedicated role to use these api's you need to add a reference to either the operations client API or the reporting client API then you simply inject the client and you're good to go the operations API as I mentioned gives you access to do operations on context and Romans specifically you may choose to approach a contact from the campaign or the engine even you can also enroll a contact directly into a campaign and then in that case entry conditions or the campaign entry trigger will not be evaluated or executed this is a question we quite often get how do I manually enroll a contact into the campaign so this is already possible in the existing API and with 902 we will be expanding on that and providing a UI for perching contacts a single contact or multiple contacts from a campaign we will also be providing an option to enroll a list of contacts into a campaign but that's for 9.1 then as I mentioned earlier we have live events now in psycho 9 and traditionally as many of you probably know events were events and interactions were not processed until the interaction was submitted that can be a problem in some cases but this is solved by using live events as they are submitted immediately and allowing it to for example personalize or - personalization during the contact journey and of course again be careful about the performance because anything you're doing live comes with a cost you can also manually register a live event using the marketing automation operations API or batch of events even if you want then finally we have the reporting API you I already has reporting built into it but you can also extract a state of yourself using a reporting API ticket campaign statistics or extract a report for the campaign then how do i integrate something with marketing automation this is a question we are quite often asked I have some data or something I want to do in marketing automation how do I do it a marketing automation can operate on all of the data that you have put in X Connect so instead of focusing on how to integrate something with marketing automation you should concentrate on integrating with X Connect that way you can use it not only within marketing automation but you can also use the data for personalization on the website for example or segmentation or anything else so please keep that in mind that being said we have of course as you've seen support for creating custom conditions that you may use in order to evaluate anything against your own data your own facets maybe you can also create custom activity types when you want to trigger something in your own component an example of this is the send email activity that's that was added a 901 for XM which is actually a custom activity if you will but keep in mind that whenever you're creating a custom activity activity and when this activity is evaluated then you're no longer in the world of XM so you don't have access to the master database for example and your services have to be registered in the IRC container if you need to use your own services and as I said the engine does support dependency injection so it's possible and then finally a few common pitfalls that we see so the engine when it processes a context our contact hunt when it processes an enrollment you get access to the contact but we don't load all of the data for this contact because obviously this could have severe performance implications so the contact loader is what determines what will be loaded and but if default its its loading and certain arrangement of your interactions certain specific interaction and contact facets you can of course change this removing some if you prefer adding your own doing whatever you want this is all documented and also you can just look in this file but this is a question we cut quite often get I created my custom activity but my custom facets I don't have that data available why is that so be mindful of that then always then also don't always load all the facets if you have a custom facet that you're using for example consider if it's really necessary to always note this this facet for for all evaluations instead you may simply use the extra neckline on the activity in order to load this facet for this context of course again this comes cause so have to weigh pros and cons and then finally the number one question that we get is I need access to the master database I have a psycho eyes and I need access to data within it no you don't that that's not how the that's that's because you're used to two to the cx-10 world you're used to engagement plans used to everything being within cycle and while we cannot stop you from using the master database we cannot stop you from adding a connection string and adding dependencies to psycho colonel we really strongly recommend that you do not because it does not scale and it will give you problems so if you want to scale out the engine if you are you should always use the built-in options that you already have available and reconsider your design you