Welcome to the first volume of AmberLeaf’s Affinium Advantage Newsletter. This newsletter provides helpful information about new products and services in the Unica Affinium Suite. In this first installment, we will highlight insights we discovered as we implemented some of the first Affinium 7 installations and upgrades.
Moving to Affinium 7 is a large-scale upgrade facing many Unica customers. AmberLeaf has extensive experience with the Unica Suite and we are one of the few professional services firms with experience implementing and upgrading to Affinium 7. We can provide you with the expertise you need for a successful Affinium 7 implementation.
This case study offers a brief summary of key lessons learned during this process, including tactical information on:
After evaluating our client’s existing Unica infrastructure, we determined that they had two upgrade options. They could either select a pure upgrade or a fresh installation with conversion. The pure upgrade would have required using Unica migration tools to upgrade from Affinium 5 to Affinium 6, and then a second migration from Affinium 6 to Affinium 7. A new installation offered the opportunity to bypass the additional migration and installation, but required more work to convert components and data between versions.
After presenting the client with the trade-offs associated with the different upgrade approaches, they decided the best approach would be to do a new installation of Affinium 7 and migrate the necessary data and required objects from Affinium 5 to Affinium 7 separately.
AmberLeaf worked with our client to identify the list of all recurring and required campaigns from Affinium 5 and created templates of each in order to move them to Affinium 7. We then copied the templates to Affinium 7. This proved to be a quick and easy way to transfer most of the processes used in the flowcharts. However, we discovered that offers, triggers, derived fields used in the Contact Style Processes, custom code generators, and custom macros need to be recreated manually. It is also important to note that there are a few functions (i.e., Date() ) that are no longer compatible between versions that also need to be re-written.
Depending on the number and complexity of your catalogs, we discovered copying the templates from one version to another automatically re-creates the necessary catalog files. We initially attempted to copy over the *.cat files prior to moving over the templates; however, once the templates were overlaid, we encountered several serious performance issues when opening flowcharts. These performance issues can be avoided by migrating the templates first and allowing them to generate the supporting catalog files automatically.
We also found that any references to flat files in the catalog will need to be changed or deleted since the root directory path in Affinium 7 takes into account partitions and a slightly different structure from Affinium 5.
Effects on Contact History
Several improvements have been made to the physical and logical use of contact history in Affinium 7. There is now a concept of detailed contact history and a significant shift towards splitting up the contact history tables on a per audience level basis. While Affinium 7 allows and promotes the use of separate physical tables for each “audience level”, this is not required.
Current performance against contact history, data volumes and data management practices were considered when determining whether or not to break up our client’s existing table. In the end, simplicity won out and the project team decided to maintain the existing single physical structure.
Another change to note is what used to be “contactdate” is now the “contactdatetime.” Our client had several downstream systems that were reliant upon the system generated "contactdate" for selection, analysis and response matching. A change in its format would have caused them to modify several bits of code across four systems. While the Unica application uses the new “contactdatetime” behind the scenes to ensure uniqueness and support deletion of records, it does not enable you to interact with that value at run time or write it to another target field to be used elsewhere. AmberLeaf was able to get around this modification by creating a database trigger that populated a custom contact history field called “contactdate” by truncating the “contactdatetime” on record insertion.
Configuration Files
The majority of configuration can now be managed through the Affinium Manager GUI so there is no longer a need to worry about missing a tag in an XML configuration file. This benefit offers easier administration for dbconfig and Affinium Campaign server parameters that used to be buried in text and XML files on the Campaign server.
As a result of this change, users may now have more control of the configuration; however, access to this portion of the site requires more attention.
Using Flat Files in Flowcharts
During this implementation, AmberLeaf uncovered several short-cuts for mapping flat files that are applicable across all versions of Unica Campaign. These include field lengths, field names, headers in delimited files, and data dictionaries in fixed-width files.
Our client was using flat text files created in outside applications as inputs for “Select” processes in the majority of their campaigns. We encountered several issues during the upgrade due to their use of these flat files. You can make this process much easier by using fixed-width files with a data dictionary. If you have to use delimited files, remember to always include a header row and be aware that Unica Campaign only looks at the first 50 records of the file. Affinium then chooses the widest value for all fields in a given column (both text and numeric) in those first 50 records. If record number 51 has one field longer than the first 50 records, the select will not work. You will not be able to get around this issue by simply over-estimating the field lengths in the file mapping GUI for the maximum must be exact.
One last important detail to note is that when moving to Affinium 7, make sure to avoid the use of numeric characters in your field names. For example, instead of using ADDRESS1, ADDRESS2, use ADDRESS_ONE, ADDRESS_TWO. This is a low level detail that can save you several hours of investigation.
Affinium 7 Experience
Amberleaf has completed several successful upgrades and standalone installs of Affinium 7. We have tested the process and thoroughly documented common issues that are likely to occur.
For more information about Unica upgrades or other AmberLeaf services, including any of our Database Marketing solutions, please contact Tim Perry at 312.593.8404 or tperry@amberleaf.net.
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