LISTSERV Maestro is a highly intuitive email marketing solution that provides organizations with an advanced tool to create, send, and track opt-in personalized email messages.
LISTSERV Maestro 2.1 builds on the powerful new abilities introduced in 2.0 to collect, manage, save, and reuse data from mailing list subscribers. The Data Warehouse has become even more flexible with the addition of an interface for customizing each page in the Subscriber Web Interface. The ability to easily modify populated datasets and dataset team collaboration has made maintaining datasets less difficult and more user-friendly.
LISTSERV Maestro 2.1 continues its progress towards full integration with LISTSERV by introducing a few new features for Hosted LISTSERV Lists (HLL) and Hosted Recipient Lists (HRL). For those using Hosted LISTSERV Lists, the ability to manage subscriber options (i.e. nomail and digest) from the LISTSERV Maestro subscriber pages has been added. For those using Hosted Recipient Lists, features that were once only available for HLLs are now available for HRLs. These features are: subscriber activity change logs, automatic bounce processing, and the ability for a subscriber to set their subscription to an HRL to “nomail”.
LISTSERV Maestro 2.1 has also made improvements to the interface for the LUI administrative account, making it easier to maintain sites with many users.
Note: The following sections assume some familiarity with the features available in LISTSERV Maestro 2.1. It is intended as an overview of the new features for LISTSERV Maestro 2.1. For a more in-depth description about the new features in LISTSERV Maestro 2.1, refer to the User’s Manual, the Administrator’s Manual, and the Data Administrator’s Manual.
Introduced in LISTSERV Maestro 2.0, the Subscriber Interface allowed subscribers to join LISTSERV Maestro Hosted Lists and update their own information. Now, with version 2.1, LISTSERV Maestro improves the Subscriber Interface by adding a powerful and flexible Customization wizard, by providing the data administrator with new subscription management options, and by offering a powerful tool for translating the LUI, HUB, and Subscriber Interface.
The Customization wizard for the Subscriber Interface makes it possible for the data administrator to customize every page and email that a subscriber will see. This will make it easier for you to focus on your subscriber’s “touch points” and convey your organization’s message. This same customization can be applied to all of the pages related to a single dataset or you can customize each individual page. For example, text for some lists can be in English, and text for others can be in French, or the entire look and feel of the signup page for an individual list can be different from all other lists in the dataset.
Context-sensitive instructions guide you through the Customization wizard, describing each template, listing the placeholders used in each template, and showing you how each template relates to the others.
The Customization wizard maintains two versions of every template – a draft version and a production version. You are also able to test the draft version of the template, using varying conditions, before releasing it into production.
For a summary on customizing the Subscriber Interface, see Section 11.1 Customizing the Subscriber Access Web Pages.
For step-by-step instructions on customizing the Subscriber Interface, see the Interface Customization Manual for LISTSERV Maestro 2.1. (This manual is new in version 2.1.)
There are two new options for subscribers:
· Hosted LISTSERV List (HLL) subscribers can now control their “nomail” and digest settings using the Subscriber Interface.
· Hosted Recipient List (HRL) subscribers can now suspend mailings on lists that they subscribe to. This is similar to the “nomail” setting in Hosted LISTSERV Lists.
For more information on using these new options, see the Section 10.2.1 Subscribing from the Membership Area.
The Resource Translation Tool (RTT) is a separate application that makes it easy to make global changes in English or to translate all of the Subscriber, LUI, and HUB pages into another language. The languages that are available for the LUI and HUB interfaces are English, French, German, Spanish, and Swedish. There are 27 languages available in the Subscriber Interface. The default language for the Subscriber Interface can be set for the whole site or by group.
Before you can start using the Translation Tool, the following basic requirements must be met:
· You need to have access to a server with an installation of LISTSERV Maestro.
· You need to have an installation of the L-Soft Resource Translation Tool.
· You need to have a Translation Tool that matches the LISTSERV Maestro version that you have installed.
· You need a good understanding of editing HTML code (and the meaning of the various HTML tags and how to escape reserved HTML characters).
The Translation Tool contains several components – one for the LISTSERV Maestro Administration Hub, one for the LISTSERV User Interface Main Application, and one for the LISTSERV User Interface Subscriber Pages.
The Translation Tool can also be used to import translations from previous versions of LISTSERV Maestro.
For more information on the Translation Tool, see the Interface Customization Manual for LISTSERV Maestro 2.1.
Introduced in LISTSERV Maestro 2.0, hosted datasets and lists gave you the ability to manage your subscribers’ data within LISTSERV Maestro. Now, with version 2.1, several new and powerful data management features have been implemented. These new features include: automatic bounce processing, flexible dataset administration, and shared subscriber management and reporting.
Automatic bounce processing has always been available for Hosted LISTSERV Lists (HLLs). Now, with version 2.1, LISTSERV Maestro has added the ability for you to define bounce processing settings for Hosted Recipient Lists (HRLs) in all of your datasets. For more information on defining automatic bounce processing, see Section 4 The Recipient Warehouse.
In LISTSERV Maestro 2.1, numerous enhancements have been made to make dataset administration easier to perform. These enhancements include:
· The ability to make modifications to a “live” dataset, such as adding, changing, or removing data fields. Once you have existing datasets in the Recipient Warehouse, their settings can be fully edited until there are lists or members added to them. After lists or members become part of a dataset, only limited editing capabilities are available. For more information, see Section 4.1.2 Editing Existing Datasets.
· The ability to designate “optional” fields as “hidden” or “read-only” so that subscribers cannot change them. It is then up to the data administrator or designated team member(s) to populate these fields. To designate an optional field as hidden or read-only, simply go to the Profile Fields screen of the Recipient Dataset Definition wizard. For more information, see any of the Profile Fields sections in this manual. They can be found in Section 6 Creating Hosted Recipient Lists and Section 7 Creating Hosted LISTSERV Lists.
· The Upload wizard can now import data from files that are missing mandatory data fields. This is done by simply defining default values to the fields with missing data. For more information on defining default values, see Section 9.3.1.6 Mapping Details. For more information on the Upload Wizard, see Section 9.3.1 The Upload Wizard.
· LISTSERV Maestro can now keep subscriber activity change logs to assist with recovery in the event of a “crash”. This log keeps track of the following activities – subscribing, unsubscribing, joining, un-registering, and address changes of all subscribers and members of hosted lists and datasets. By default, the subscriber change log is deactivated. For more information, see the Administrator’s Manual for LISTSERV Maestro 2.1.
· The name fields for Hosted LISTSERV Lists (HLLs) can now be marked as “optional”, and the Firstname<space>Lastname restriction has been removed. To designate a name field as optional, simply go to the Profile Fields screen of the Recipient Dataset Definition wizard. For more information, see any one of the three sections on Profile Fields in Section 7 Creating Hosted LISTSERV Lists.
· The default language for use on the Subscriber Pages can now be set at the dataset level. To set the language, simply go to the General screen of the Recipient Dataset Definition wizard. For more information, see Section 4.1.1.1 General Settings.
· The number of entries for any single lookup table has been increased from 200 to 1000 items. For more information about lookup tables, see Section 4.1.3 Creating a Lookup Table.
Team Collaboration is now available for all datasets, allowing the data administrator to designate certain rights to other team members. These rights include the ability to add, remove, or modify subscribers, plus the ability to browse through subscriber data for purposes of downloading data for reports, etc. For more information on how to designate these rights to specific team members, see Section 9.4 Team Collaboration.
In addition, data administrators can now define default Team Collaboration settings for all new datasets. For more information, see the User’s Manual for LISTSTER Maestro 2.1.
Several enhancements have been made to improve your ability to track the behavior of the recipients of your email jobs.
The administrator can now control what tracking types each user or group is able to define while tracking a LISTSERV Maestro email job. For more information on setting up tracking restrictions, see the Administrator’s Manual for LISTSERV Maestro 2.1.
If drop-ins are enabled in the content of a message and if the content contains at least one user-defined drop-in (not a system drop-in), then you now have the ability to track the links within this drop-in content. For more information on tracking link within drop-in content, see the User’s Manual for LISTSERV Maestro 2.1.
Several enhancements have been made to improve the administrator’s ability to manage and control accounts. These enhancements are described in the following sections.
The LUI interface for the special “admin” account has been improved, making it easier for the administrator to deal with staffing changes. These enhancements include:
· The ability to display jobs or reports owned by a particular owner or group.
· The ability to list all jobs or reports that have been “orphaned” when that particular account owner was deleted.
· The ability to change the owner of more than one job or report at a time.
· The ability to delete more than one job or report at a time.
· The ability to archive more than one job at a time.
· The ability to import more than one job at a time.
For more information on these enhancements to the LUI “admin” account, see the Administrator’s Manual for LISTSERV Maestro 2.1.
Translations for the Subscriber Pages are maintained externally with the L-Soft Resource Translation Tool and are made available to LISTSERV Maestro as JAR files. New versions of these files are automatically loaded by the system during startup. However, in certain situations, the administrator may want to refresh or get new versions of the translation files without restarting. This is now possible with the simple click of a button. For more information, see the Administrator’s Manual for LISTSERV Maestro 2.1.
In certain situations (i.e. testing an upgrade, beta testing, or training), it may be useful to make a copy of all the data in a given LISTSERV Maestro installation and transfer it into a second (test-bed) installation without affecting the production installation. For more information, see the Administrator’s Manual for LISTSERV Maestro 2.1.
LISTSERV Maestro now allows you to use DomainKeys signatures to authenticate that the message (sent for a specific email job) does indeed originate from the domain in the “From:” address. Major ISPs already check every incoming mail to see if it is signed with a valid DomainKeys signature. Once DomainKeys has become an accepted standard for message origin verification, the current policy of only informing the recipient about the DomainKeys verification result in an additional header entry may change, and an ISP may opt to not even deliver the message to the recipient or to mark it as coming from an unsure origin. Therefore, in order to achieve good deliverability, signing messages with a valid DomainKeys signature will become more important in the future.
Support for DomainKeys signatures in LISTSERV Maestro works on three levels:
· LISTSERV as the mail distribution engine must be configured to support DomainKeys signatures for certain address domains, which requires creating a valid private/public RSA key pair and additional configuration of LISTSERV parameters. See the LISTSERV documentation for further details about setting up DomainKeys at a LISTSERV host.
· The LISTSERV Maestro Administration Hub allows you to enable or disable DomainKeys signatures on the application default level and the group/single user level.
· The LISTSERV Maestro User Interface contains settings for defining the sender of a certain email job.
For information on the default DomainKeys signature settings, see the Administrator’s Manual for LISTSERV Maestro 2.1.
For information on using DomainKeys signatures while defining the sender information of an email job, see the User’s Manual for LISTSERV Maestro 2.1.
The following database and operating system enhancements have been added to LISTSERV Maestro 2.1:
· Asian languages are now supported by LISTSERV Maestro. This includes all Korean, Chinese, and Japanese characters (charsets).
· It is now possible to define a MS SQL Server database using its instance name.
· IBM DB2 version 8.2 is now a supported DBMS for a system database or a recipient data source. A new database plugin has been added to access IBM DB2 V8.2 with a “thin” driver, which does not require the installation of the native DB2 database client on the LUI server.
· Oracle 10g is now a supported DBMS for a system database or a recipient data source.
· The LISTSERV Maestro server is now supported on Mac OS X 10.4 and other compatible versions.
· The Mozilla Firefox browser on Mac OS X is now supported as a LISTSERV Maestro client for accessing the LUI and HUB interfaces.
· The Safari browser (version 2.0, build 412 and later) on Mac OS X is now supported as a LISTSERV Maestro client for accessing the LUI and HUB interfaces.
· MS SQL Server 2005 is now supported with the free open-source jTDS driver. The jTDS driver support is also available with MS SQL Server 2000.
· New or customized web pages (independent of LISTSERV Maestro) can now be served by the Tomcat Server.
For more information on any of these enhancements, see the Administrator’s Manual for LISTSERV Maestro 2.1.