Proceedings for the Striata Technical Conference kicked off on 11 May 2015, in Rosebank/Johannesburg, South Africa. Developers from across the Globe flew in to be part of this exciting annual event.

Sessions were aimed to inspire, educate and focus on producing great emails & email creation tools.

The focus for  the first half of the week, was on getting teams to find the best ways to create and implement some  tools and existing ideas. The week ended off with an  Innovations Day, which allowed minds to wander freely and explore new ideas.

Here are some highlights:

UX

Several of the projects focused on various different aspects of UX design in emails, from enhancing email cover pages to going “beyond responsive”,  landing pages and secure document content enhancement.

Tools

Email scrubber – We all know that a clean email base is essential for good delivery, The email scrubber is a utility that allows you to upload a potential email list. The result does a syntax check on the email address and applies region specific rules to fix it

Character encoding – Dealing with multiple languages across the world can sometimes be challenging, especially if the email copy  is provided in a word document and when converted to HTML, it looks a little more foreign than it should.

To get characters to look like this:

ABC möchte seinen geschätzten Kunden jederzeit beste Qualität liefern, nicht nur bei unseren Produkten, sondern auch bei den von uns angebotenen Dienstleistungen.

in HTML they need to be written as:

ABC möchte seinen geschätzten Kunden jederzeit beste Qualität liefern, nicht nur bei unseren Produkten, sondern auch bei den von uns angebotenen Dienstleistungen.

Doing this for each character is time consuming. The character encoding tool lets you paste the copy and it does all the conversions for you.

Automatic Plain text version – The correct way to send email is as a Multipart MIME message, which means creating an HTML and a Plain text version for each campaign. So, we created a tool that automatically converts HTML to Plain text in one easy click.

Biometrics

Striata already supports secure eDocuments on desktop and in a mobile app. Typically a “shared secret” would have to be  typed in the space provided, to open a secure document This was extended to support Biometrics within the app and mobile device (those that support biometrics) allowing you to access secure documents using your fingerprints, rather than remembering a password. Another step closer to user convenience.

Real Time content

Emails have moved away from simple personalization to relevant content, based on  the time you are reading the email and where you are located. This example shows a countdown clock for your Utilities’ next maintenance window in your area

Before: Your outage is at 10am on x date

After:

Striata Application – Mobile app

Yes! Everything is going mobile, so why not have the ability to see how your campaign is performing?

Test automation

There is a lot of industry focus on email testing before the email gets sent. This is to make sure it renders properly and lands up in the inbox. For secure eDocument providers like Striata however, not all emails are once-off campaigns. We need to check that best practices are being adhered to (Images sizes, HTML validation etc.) so, we test at different levels. Automating these steps assist clients and staff to be more productive and accurate in their testing

Emails – All the information you need in a single QA report

Projects – After any change, like an upgrade or a change request, having a single click check for all projects  to confirm that changes were implemented successfully, is essential

Servers/Environments – Our environments are often deployed at banks and maintained by in – house staff. Utilities that automatically check the “health” and setup of the Striata environment make it easier to maintain

Amazing techies, produce amazing stuff! We look forward to transforming their ideas and inventions into an  exceptional customer experience, ultimately translating into great value for our clients.

Let’s see what we can do for you…