Regional ScandAsia April magazine published as emagazine

ScandAsia April for Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos has finally been distributed to all the Danes, Swedes, Norwegians and Finns living in those countries. But what a hassle it was!

Constant Contact, the service provider for the software used to create and distribute the magazine, had for some time warned that they were rolling out a new system to manage the contact database in its backend, but when it finally happened it was clear that all our data had been scattered randomly over a range of categories like Home Address, Work Address, Other Address. A quick visit to the support forum showed that other users where as mad as I was. 

Teflon kind people on the phone support line - who only work US working hours - explained that there was no turning back to the old contact management system. The best thing would probably be, they concluded, that I manually edited each subscriber. 

We have close to 11.000 contacts in the system. I guess one could open and process and save again 100 contacts per hour, that would be 110 working hours, that would be 13 days. Songkran was coming up here in Thailand and I thought I could stay dry and off the street by battle the system with some backend wizardry like downloading the whole database, then making a macro to change the data offline, then uploading the data again. 

To make a long story short, after three days of head scratching desperation I gave up. I have now hired a temporary staff and together with another internal staff they have started the processing of the 11.000 contacts manually. Constant Contact, I hate you!

In the process I have fallen victim to the Olof Palme syndrome of the IT world: I have learned so much about the cringes of this horrible system and its special logic that I in my last call with a supporter was actually able to tell him, what the system could and could not do. He was impressed. I almost loved the system for the supremacy it had given me over their own support staff.

Now, 18th of April 2014, we have sent out the first email from the new backend - the April edition of the regional ScandAsia magazine covering Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. 

It went well! I am cautiously excited. From the discussion on the support forum I have been warned of yet to meet trouble when it comes to processing bouncing emails, but right now I am just happy that our readers finally got their magazine. 

I hope, they are happy too!

This is what they got: