Delano's new server provides built-in e-mail for e-commerce sites, but at what cost?

Much has been said about how a company's Web site serves as the cornerstone of its electronic commerce efforts. However, the ubiquity and power of the simple e-mail message is also an imperative building block for business success on the Internet.

However, building hybrid e-mail/ Web applications can be tedious and expensive.

The Delano e-Business Interaction Suite, released in May (when it was called E-Mail Application Server), takes a stab at bridging the gap between e-mail and Web-based applications. Delano's product brings together Web and e-mail applications in a simple and powerful package. While some shops may be shocked at the product's high price — it starts at $50,000 — or concerned with its Windows NT-only focus, Delano e-Business Interaction Suite's ease of use, the simplicity with which it integrates with existing systems and its overall flexibility earns the product our World Class Award.

The server doesn't have to reside on your corporate e-mail or Web server. Instead, it can remotely monitor any Post Office Protocol 3 or Internet Message Access Protocol 4 server and decide what to do with the messages. It can spawn a reply, route a message to a particular user, store a message to a database and perform many other actions. The fact that it can sit in the middle of a variety of existing mail servers and Web technologies lets an organization easily implement the product without interfering with established systems. This is one of the server's key strengths: It doesn't require you to use a particular e-mail system, Web server, directory server or database.

The product consists of three major modules: the e-Business Application Builder, the e-Business Interaction Server and the e-Business Interaction Server Administrator. The e-Business Application Builder can be run from a client system or run with the e-Business Interaction Suite itself on the server. The Application Builder is a workflow-style application that lets you build an e-mail application by dragging Delano-specific software components onto a workspace and connecting them together like a flow chart.

The e-mail application begins with a "start event" component that could be the receipt of an e-mail message to a particular account, the submission of a Web form via HTTP, the occurrence of a timed event or the launch of some other script. Once the application has been triggered, it can invoke a variety of "action" components. The options include parsing the message text, calling up another script, running an external program, querying a database, saving the content to a file or database, returning a Web page via HTTP or sending out an e-mail message.

You can use simple decision components to perform comparisons or loop through data. However, given that you can access server-side scripts written in JScript or VBscript, you can write code to implement any form of decision beyond the ones included in the product. Lastly, a "wait" component can be used to make the program wait for a particular event, such as a user responding to an e-mail message or an HTML form.

Delano e-Business Interaction Suite made it very easy to build a rudimentary mail responder that would send back canned responses when e-mail came to an address such as sales@democompany.com. It was also fairly simple to create an application that took entered data, saved the data to a file or database and then presented a confirmation screen. We also created scheduled e-mails that would query a database to send a message to users who hadn't logged on to the site recently, and an application that routes messages based upon simple string comparisons of message subjects.

The complexity and Web integration of the application is up to the designer. For example, Delano demonstrates a simple reminder-based system on its Web site that can send scheduled e-mails to users based upon events that users enter via a Web form.

Administering various server features can be controlled from an administrator module that lets you monitor and control the e-mail application you build. If you'd rather do this from a Web browser, you can also use an optional Web-based version of the administrator, as well as Delano Web Connector, a Web server application that enables the product to deal with form queries and create dynamic pages.

Installation of Delano e-Business Interaction Suite 1.0 is very easy. The product has modest requirements: a copy of Windows NT Workstation or Server 4.0 with the latest service pack applied, 128M bytes of RAM and 40M bytes of disk space.

The best thing about the Delano environment is how easy it is to build e-mail-based applications. The design environment was intuitive. It was a snap to debug and deploy the applications.

The downside is that the product always seemed to require something else, such as a database or some other application, to do much of anything beyond what a simple mailing list program or server-side scripting environment, such as Microsoft's Active Server Pages or Allaire's ColdFusion, could handle.

This is the product's strength and its weakness. Because Delano e-Business Interaction Suite doesn't require any particular technology, it can fit into any e-commerce infrastructure, Web application development environment or personalization system in place. On the other hand, if you don't have all the pieces of your Web site in place, it won't help much. If you expect to create personalized messages for site visitors, you'd better have a user database or membership system in place. If you want to let people know their order status, you need to understand your e-commerce system so you can grab the data and send a message. In short, if you want to do something sophisticated with Delano e-Business Interaction Suite, you probably ought to have done portions of it already in another technology.

Delano's solution to e-mail-Web integration isn't for everyone because its pricing sets it up squarely as an enterprise application. Pricing is based upon the number of applications deployed, ranging from $50,000 for midsize implementations to $250,000 for enterprise-class deployments.

For those who have complex automated messaging requirements, Delano e-Business Interaction Suite's pricing may not be an issue. The product's power and ease of use live up to its high price.

Note: Individual category scores are based on a scale of 1-10. Percentages are the weight given each category in determining the total score. The World Class Award goes to products that earn 9.0 or above on our scorecard.

Net Results

Delano Technology
(905) 764-5499
www.delanotech.com
(dead link)
Starts at $50,000

Pros: Strong e-mail automation capabilities; Very easy-to-use visual development tool; Fits in well with existing e-mail, Web or database systems.
Cons: High price; Requires other products to enable full capabilities.

Originally published on Network World, Published: August 30, 1999.