I’m not referring to spam here.
My customer needed a way to communicate with subsets of their customers. All of the (internal) customers were in a database and they were classified by which type of customer they were. Luckily the email addresses were also available.
There was no budget to build a custom piece of software and the security hurdles were fairly high on creating a bulk mailing application.
I put on my thinking cap and brainstormed that we could use Cognos Bursting to send an email to subsets of their customers.
The user was promoted with which types of customers they wished to contact, then a few text box prompts were used for the message of the email. I drove the prompt values into the query so I could create a “report” that contained one row of the “data” … in this case the data was the body of the email. The users’ email address from the database was the burst email and the report was grouped on each row so we would send an email to each person in the selected result set.