I am aware of Maestro (the UofMn already owns Lyris) but the problem  
with these solutions (I cannot accurately speak to Maestro but it  
appears I am mostly correct from the promo materials) is that we  
still intend to use these DBMS-maintained lists as discussion lists;  
Lyris (and Maestro?) does not work well in that way.

The reason for the database connectivity is to drive the list  
population with our Peoplesoft data and avoid most of the human  
element in maintaining subscriber lists for the myriad collections of  
people that need to be accurately maintained in our enterprise (e.g.  
A discussion list for all tenured faculty, or all staff, etc; as you  
can imagine with 80k+ people in the organization, these lists are  
huge and no department is lord over these wide swaths of people,  
having people do this management in listserv is silly when we've got  
the data elsewhere and already maintained by business process there).

We still have a need for lists that individuals can control their  
subscriptions to and for lists that contain people outside out  
enterprise, so we had hoped that listserv might be agile enough to  
cover all aspects of our discussion/distro list needs--the marketing/ 
tracking part is covered by Lyris at the moment and gets much less  
use than these discussion lists.

It looks as though all indications are that Listserv's DBMS will not  
work in the way I had hoped. Is there a way to dump a text file to  
listserv on the back side periodically with a list of subscribers  
(I'm looking for a file to overwrite or an interface that would be  
susceptible to perl scripting on the listserv server itself and would  
like to avoid the email/web interface)?

Thanks for all of the responses!

--
_______________________________________________
Mike Neuharth, BA, LPIC-1
Email/UNIX System Administrator
Internet Services, University of Minnesota
===============================================
"What is important, it seems to me, is not so much to defend a culture
whose existence has never kept a man from going hungry, as to extract,
from what is called culture, ideas whose compelling force is identical
with that of hunger."  -Antonin Artaud


On Dec 6, 2006, at 11:14 AM, Francoise Becker wrote:

> On 6 Dec 2006 at 10:56, mjn wrote:
>
>> I guess the way I envisioned us implementing the
>> DBMS support was this: we provide listserv to our clients, they
>> create tables or views on their systems specifically (one per list or
>> one table for all lists), they provide us with connection/credential
>> information and we configure the DBMS part for them. In production,
>> they make changes to the subscription for a given list by changing
>> the contents of the table/view. I was thinking of listserv using the
>> DBMS sources as read-only as opposed to making changes to the table.
>
> I recommend that you take a serious look at LISTSERV Maestro. It may
> be able to save you a LOT of work and hassle.
>
> -- 
> Francoise Becker
>
> There is only one LISTSERV(R) -- the product that launched the
> email list communication industry in 1986. To discover the
> story behind LISTSERV, visit:
> http://www.lsoft.com/corporate/20anniversary.asp