Winter 2009 Detailed Release Notes

This page contains a list of the features included in the Winter 2009 Release, deployed Friday, March 6, 2009.

• User Experience
  • From Name and Test Send in Send Preview
  • Default View of Landing Page Sender Preview
  • Dynamic content wizard support for data extensions
• Tracking
  • Excel Reports
  • Print to PDF
  • View Printable Format
  • Did Not Click/Did Not Open Module
  • Additional Drill-In Information
  • Interface Fine Tuning
• Integration
  • SpamAssassin content testing
• SMS Message Enhancements
  • AMPscript Support
  • Multi-Level Conversation Support
  • Query Activity Support
  • Miscellaneous Tracking and Error-Handling Improvements
• iPhone Application
  • Send monitoring/control API
• Content Management
  • Integration with Omniture Test&Target
• Message Delivery
  • AMPscript file attachment support
  • Transactional send definition unsubscribe behavior
  • Optimized sending
• Streamlined Landing Pages
• Enterprise 2.0
  • Security
  • Sharing
  • Subscriber Management
• API Changes
  • Send Control
  • SpamAssassin-Related Changes
  • Reply Mail Management-Related Changes
  • Microsoft Dynamics CRM-Related Changes
  • Publication List Changes
• Integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM
  • Better Control over High Volume Email Sends
  • More Tracking Information Options

User Experience

The following changes will impact the way that you interact with the ExactTarget application:

From Name and Test Send in Send Preview
The Send Preview is receiving some much-requested enhancements with the Winter 2009 Release.

To access the Send preview, you click the Send Preview button when you are editing the email in the email editor.

A screen appears where you can choose the subscriber for which to preview the email. You select the list and then the subscriber, and the preview will show you the dynamic content and personalization according to the attributes of the person that you select.

New to this screen is the ability to select the from name for the preview. You can select the same from names that you can select in the email wizard.

After you click the Generate Preview button, the email appears according to the options you just selected. New to this screen are:

• The from name and subject line at the top
• The Send Test Email button, which allows you to send the exact email you are previewing to any email address you enter, regardless of whether the email address currently exists on a subscriber list. This allows you to send yourself a version of the email to see live in your inbox without having to import your own email address to a list. NOTE: The test message you send is a live send. The system treats it like a regular email job, for example, if you click the unsubscribe link in the test email, the subscriber for which you previewed the email will be unsubscribed.

Default View of Landing Page Sender Preview
Landing pages have a preview available that is similar to the send preview for emails. Using this preview tool, you can select a subscriber from a list and see what the landing page would look like for that subscriber.

With this release, you will be able to use this preview tool without selecting a subscriber by selecting the Do not use subscriber data checkbox. The preview shows what would appear if a person accessed the landing page from a link outside of an email, so that no information about the subscriber was passed to the page.

This preview options page has also been updated to remove the ability to select a data extension, because the landing page cannot accept the data extension ID as a parameter so any data extension you select does not impact the display of the landing page.

Dynamic Content Wizard Support for Data Extensions
After the Winter 2009 release, you will be able to create dynamic content selection criteria based on values in data extensions, in addition to values in subscriber attributes.

When you create the dynamic content in a content area, you select the name of a data extension instead of the subscriber attribute list. The data extension you select determines the column names that you can choose when you create the criteria for the dynamic content.

Tracking

Click to see full-size image.

Excel Reports
On the Overview, Survey, and Conversion Details tabs of the visual tracking interface, there is now an Excel button. When you click this button, the tracking information on the Overview tab appears in an Excel document.

Print to PDF
The Overview and Click Details tabs now include the ability to generate a PDF. If you generate the PDF from the Overview tab, it includes all of the modules on the tab. If you generate the PDF from the Click Details tab, it includes the Link Activity information.

NOTE: You must have enhanced tracking only enabled on your account to use print to PDF. Contact ExactTarget to have enhanced tracking only enabled in your account.

View Printable Format
From the Overview tab, you can now select the modules you'd like to include in a printable view of the tracking.

Did Not Click/Did Not Open Module
The Overview tab now includes a module with statistics about messages not clicked and not opened.

Additional Drill-In Information
The Overview tab now features three additional data points that you can click for detail information:

• Sent subscribers
• Did not click
• Did not open

For each data point, you can export the detail information, copy the detail to a list, or create a new list.

Interface Fine Tuning
The tab that was previously called "Overlay" is now called "Click Details." The Link Activity module, which was previously on the Overview tab, now appears on the Click Details tab.

Integration

SpamAssassin Content Testing
SpamAssassin is a trusted application for identifying spam and preventing it from getting into subscribers' inboxes. ExactTarget's integration with SpamAssassin will make it possible for API users to subject an email to the SpamAssassin algorithms, return a score, and identify the parts of your message that might make ISPs incorrectly identify it as spam.

SMS Message Enhancements

AMPscript Support
With the Winter 2009 Release, you will be able to include AMPscript code in SMS messages. This functionality will greatly expand the flexibility of SMS messages, allowing you to include information from data extensions, write data to data extensions, access SMS-type content areas, and invoke the API from an SMS message.

Multi-Level Conversation Support
Previously, the SMS functionality only allowed you to respond to one command from an SMS user in a conversation (except for double-opt-in conversations where the user sent and received a confirmation message). For example, if you set up an SMS conversation to respond with the current temperature to the command "WEATHER", you could not continue the conversation beyond the first exchange. With this release, you can define any number of exchanges in an SMS conversation.

Query Activity Support
This enhancement allows you to use the query activity to select subscriber SMS records and publication subscriber records.

Miscellaneous Tracking and Error-Handling Improvements
ExactTarget continues to improve the performance and experience of the SMS tool. With this release, several small enhancements have been made to the tracking and error handling aspects of the SMS feature.

iPhone Application

If you attended Connections 2008, then you saw the prototype of an ExactTarget monitoring application for your iPhone. This application will allow you to monitor your email jobs, as well as eventually perform some small commands, such as stop the job and restart the job.

For the Winter 2009 Release, ExactTarget is introducing the API support for the commands that you will be able to perform with the iPhone application. These changes will not affect your application.

Content Management

Integration with Omniture Test&Target
Live Content for Omniture, the enhancements to the Omniture integration, will be available in the Innovations Labs in the coming months. Watch 3sixty for more information.
This feature will allow you to select the content to render in an email at the time the email is opened rather than when the email is built. The logic you use to determine the content to include can be based on data collected by Omniture on an ongoing basis.

Message Delivery

AMPscript File Attachment
With the Winter 2009 Release, you will be able to include AMPscript in the body of your email message to attach a file to the email.

Transactional send definition unsubscribe behavior

With the Winter 2009 Release, ExactTarget is introducing additional sophistication to transactional send classifications. When you create a transactional send classification, you will have the option to "Honor source and publication list level opt outs."

• If you select this option, transactional messages that you send using the classification will not be send to people who have opted out of the list associated with the send definition.
• If you do not select this option, transactional messages that you send using the classification will not include an unsubscribe link, since the system would not honor the unsubscribe for these transactional messages.

Optimized Sending
ExactTarget continues to streamline the sending process to keep emails moving smoothly, even at the extremely large volumes that the system processes. Advancements in this area, such as allowing an email job to begin sending emails before the list is entirely processes, will not change your experience with the application interface, but will improve the performance of your email sends.

Streamlined Landing Pages

This functionality is being tested for customer acceptance in the Innovations Lab. Check out 3sixty for more information.

This tool provides a simpler version of the microsites toolset. Instead of creating a microsite interaction that can be associated to multiple landing pages, this toolset will allow you to create, publish, and pause landing pages from a single location.

Enterprise 2.0

A beta version of this functionality is planned to be available in the Innovations Lab in April 2009. Watch 3sixty for more information.

ExactTarget has been working to create a more flexible and powerful enterprise solution. With the Winter 2009 Release, this solution enjoys more robust functionality around permissions, sharing, and subscriber management.

Permissions
Permissions are controls that determine whether a user has access to view, create, update, or delete an item in the system. With the new permissions model, every item, screen, toolbar, and even button can have an associated permission.

Because it would be so onerous to set all of the permissions (potentially hundreds of them) for each user in your system, we're also introducing the concept of roles. Each user is assigned a role (such as "Content Creator" or "Legal Counsel") and that role has a set of permissions associated with it. You can also associate roles with business units to aggregate the permissions to an even higher level.

Sharing
Enterprise users must be able to share their emails, templates, and other items in their account with their child accounts. The new sharing model is much more granular and flexible in allowing you to share items with exactly the right people.

Subscriber Management
In large enterprises, the ownership of lists and subscribers can be confusing. In Enterprise 2.0, every subscriber will exist at the parent account level. The subscribers will be marked with the correct attribute data so that child accounts can see and send to their own subscribers. For example, if the western division of an enterprise imports a list of subscribers, the system uploads that list to the parent account level and marks the subscribers as being associated with the western division.

Using this method of subscriber storage allows you greater control in giving subscribers the option to opt-in and opt-out of some or all of your enterprise's publications.

API Changes

Send Control
The following functionality is supported with the Winter 2009 Release:

• The ability to pause and resume an email job
• The ability to see the status of an email job

SpamAssassin-Related Changes
This change supports running a SpamAssassin test against your email. The call will return your SpamAssassin score, as well as a description of what parts of the email influenced the score.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM-Related Changes
The Sources property is being added to the Send object. This property is reserved for use by the Microsoft Dynamics CRM integration.

Publication List Changes
This feature will be available for the Enterprise 2.0 edition of the product.
With this release, you will be able to identify a publication list as an opt-out list. The OptOutList enumeration value for the SendDefinitionListTypeEnum is being added to support this functionality via the API.

Reply Mail Management-Related Changes
This feature is in active development. It is scheduled to be available in the weeks following the Winter 2009 Release, so we are including it here for your reference.
This change will allow you to configure the Reply Mail Management (RMM) feature using the API. With this change, you will be able to set the same configuration options that you can currently set on the Reply Mail Management screen in the user interface.

Integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM

The latest version of ExactTarget for Microsoft Dynamics CRM enables new features that exercise greater control over tracking information and how emails are sent. To take advantage of these new features, you must upgrade your ExactTarget for Microsoft Dynamics CRM installation and install Rollup 2 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Better control over high volume email sends
ExactTarget for Microsoft Dynamics CRM can now control how emails are sent from the CRM instance through the ExactTarget system. When Send Batching is enabled, send options include the threshold for sends to be batched into smaller jobs and the size of those batch jobs. The email sends are sent to a separate data extension, where the ExactTarget system queues the send’s recipients and sends the email to them when the batch is completed according to the Send Batching settings. This reduces the potential strain that large email sends could cause to your CRM server and reduces the likelihood of timeouts between your server and the ExactTarget system.

More Tracking Information Options
Today, ExactTarget for Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides individual tracking information for all of your email recipients when they take action on your message. Our new enhancements provide both additional data and the ability to tailor that data to your specific needs.

ExactTarget for Microsoft Dynamics CRM enables several different tracking options for your email integration across each Microsoft Dynamics CRM org. For example, if you manage several different orgs on your server, each one can have their own personalized tracking options. These options include:

1. No tracking data pushed back to your CRM account.
2. Aggregated tracking information only, with no individual recipient data pushed back to your CRM account
3. Individual tracking information for all recipients of your email when one of these events occur:
   • Bounce
   • Click
   • Open
   • Unsubscribe
4. Individual tracking information for all recipients of your email, not just the instances where one of the four event above occurred.

ExactTarget for Microsoft Dynamics CRM also provides more information on bounced email. This information can be updated immediately at the click of a button, or it can be accessed by your CRM account on an hourly or daily basis.

With these changes, ExactTarget for Microsoft Dynamics CRM makes it possible to better customize your email sends and get helpful and accurate tracking information.