Whew! We’ve been as busy as little elves here at NextMark. On December 20th (last week), we successfully launched version 6.7 of our direct marketing software platform. The highlight of this release was the completion of software to enable the electronic exchange of mailing list orders through the DMAX specification. News of this innovation was covered by DM News and BtoB Magazine.
What’s DMAX? It’s short for "Direct Marketing Exchange" and is a set of standards for exchanging electronic documents as part of the direct marketing process. The DMAX protocol is expressed through a Web Service Description Language (WSDL) that specifies the structure of electronic documents in Extensible Markup Language (XML) that are transmitted from one party to another via Web Services protocols.
Yes, very technical. But the good news is you won’t have to get involved with any of the technical stuff. If done right, it’s as easy as using email. In fact, email is built on a bunch of technical standards like SMTP and POP3, but you don’t have to know about any of that to use email. DMAX works similarly to email in that way.
Version 6.7 is also notable because it completes a year long project for infoUSA. In this project, we made 210 software improvements to support the needs of the various business units within infoUSA: Walter Karl, Edith Roman, Millard Group, and others. This is the biggest project we’ve ever done for any single client and I am happy to report it was delivered on time and under budget. This would not have been possible without a lot of cooperation. And that would not have been possible without the superb project management by Dan German and Sue Harrison at infoUSA and John Swindell here at NextMark. Great work!
All of these changes were implemented in 7 software releases over the last 13 months, with version 6.7 culminating that effort. That said, this is more of a beginning than an end. In 2008, we’ll be forging ahead with our initiative to connect the data cards to the data and using our infrastructure to connect other marketing services.
2008 is going to be an exciting year!