What is a Delivery Channel?

In CONNECT, a Delivery Channel is a way to deliver messages. Older versions of CONNECT only supported two delivery channels: Email via SMTP and SMS messages via SMPP.

• The email delivery channel is configured with information such as the mail farm locations and how many concurrent connections should be maintained to the mail farm hosts.

• The SMS delivery channel is configured with information about the SMSC servers, connection pool size, etc.

Delivery Channels are now software components that implement an API in the CONNECT architecture. For example, email, SMS, iOS Push, Android (GCM) Push, Fax, and Twitter are all delivery channels implemented in CONNECT. Since delivery channels are now explicit software components, delivery channels can be selectively deployed, and new delivery channels can be implemented and deployed without requiring a new software release.

Delivery Channel Address Attributes

Since Delivery Channels represent new ways to deliver messages, they each require an “address” to be stored for each customer record. These addresses are stored using customer attributes; each delivery channel is associated with an attribute that is used to store the endpoint address for that delivery channel.

CONNECT assumes that one attribute is sufficient to store the endpoint address for each deliver channel. In the case of the iOS push (APNS) channel, the endpoint address is the device token provided by the iOS runtime when the iOS application registers for remote notifications

Deploying Delivery Channels

In version 10R4, CONNECT added the ability for multiple active deployments to share the same database schema. Each active deployment is known as a Cluster or Message Cluster, and consists of inside nodes (Conversation Manager, Profiler, etc) and outside nodes (Mail Senders, SMPP Senders, Trackers, etc.). Each Delivery Channel must be deployed to a Cluster before the Cluster can send messages using the Delivery Channel.

The email and SMS channels are an exception to this: the email channel is deployed to the cluster automatically when the Mail Sender and Receiver components are deployed, and the SMS channel is automatically deployed when the SMPP Sender and Receiver components are deployed. Every other Delivery Channel executes within the Mail Sender/Receiver or within the SMPP Sender/Receiver components.

Other Delivery Channels (besides than email and SMS) must be explicitly deployed to a cluster before being used. This deployment process is performed in two steps: In the first step, the Delivery Channel is configured in the CONNECT UI. In the second step, the Delivery Channel is deployed to a CONNECT Cluster.