Hi Belinda Sorensen :
With the help of Ilya Hoffman at DemandByte, we built a VERY COOL front end portal that leverages the Eloqua engine but still provides our marketers autonomy when sending Transactional messages. We also leverage Security Labels - so that our transactional messages were held to different constraints than our marketing messages. You can check out http://demandbyte.com/products/email-marketing-portal to see more details on the process - or reach out to Ilya directly. Good Luck!