135 Release Notes

NOTE: These release notes are in DRAFT form and are subject to change until the release date. The release is currently scheduled for Friday, Nov 6, 2009. More information will be available Wednesday, October 28.

Time Zone

You now may set your Time Zone and Date Format preferences in order to view time-related data in your time zone and format rather than the default CST and en-US. These modifications can be made at the user level, account level, and as a business unit (Enterprise 2.0). Changes will be honored throughout the GUI, Standard Reports, and Extracts.

Twitter Integration

You can update your Twitter status and send direct messages through email sends. You can use this functionality for coupon offers, sending links to newsletters and promotional material, or updating Twitter pages.

ExactTarget's Twitter Integration offers three possibilities.

• Update Twitter Status sends a status update to your Twitter account every time a subscriber executes an action that you define. This function is intended for use on landing pages.
• Update Twitter Status by Job sends a status update to your Twitter account once per email send job. This function is intended for use in emails.
• Direct Twitter Message sends a direct message via Twitter to a subscriber's account. Any account you send a direct message to must be following your Twitter account. This function is intended for us in emails.

Email

New Email History Page
Our new release has updated the Email History page.

Text-Only Emails
You now have the ability to send a Text Only email to subscribers. This means that ExactTarget overrides HTML/Text preference and sends the Text version of the email to all subscribers. All links are still wrapped and can be tracked.

Save Email as Template
Users now have the ability to create an email and save it as a template. Content boxes can be empty, static, or editable

Enterprise 2.0

Business Unit Hierarchy View
Release 135 provides a hierachical view of business units in Enterprise 2.0 accounts. You can also toggle between grid view and hierarchical view.

Mass Administration
You can now import multiple users and business units. Being able to import users also allows you to set a default role and business unit, and allows you to mass disable users.

UI Extensions
This release allows you to extend pages within the application. You can:

• Create custom toolbar actions within the listing page.
• Navigate to landing pages or other external URLs when the action is selected.
• Pass contextual information about the page and/or selected items to the target URLs.

Simplified Creation Tools

Several changes have occurred on the email creation, survey creation, and template creation pages in the application. These changes took place to streamline tools and upgrade technology.

Reporting Changes

Date/Time Format with Reports
When you run a report, you now have to define the date and time format in which you want to run the report. For example, if you’re in New York, but you want to run a report for your boss in London, you can set the date and time format to London’s time zone so your boss sees the report in his time. The report will always display results in the date and time format you set when you run the report.

Date/Time Format with Extracts
When you create a data extract, you now have to define the date and time format in which you want the data extract to run.

Multi-join filters

The multi-join filter functionality allows you to create a data filter that gets information from more than one data extension. You can filter up to three data extensions at a time (more may be requested). The feature is available for all clients with Data Extensions

Reply mail Management

The reply mail management system features a new, more robust rule-based functionality that allows for greater extensibility in the future. The new enhancements for the RMM in this release includes support for international double-byte characters and support for dynamic From names as part of an On-Your-Behalf send or sends involving dynamic owners. If you use dynamic From names in your sends, the reply mails go to those names and not the default email address for that job. This feature will be live for new customers and new current customers will be migrated over as soon as possible.

SMS

SMS users can now use AMPscript to pull tracking information regarding their SMS sends using the job ID of the send. This allows users to view this tracking information in a landing page or a custom user interface.

Imports

Included in 135 is the ability to import any date format into a date-type field in a subscriber attribute or data extension.

Maintenance

Imports
The screen you use when you create an import activity has enjoyed some improvements with this release. In addition to to some small changes to the fields names on the screen, a new Respect double quotes (") as a text delimiter checkbox has been added. If you do not select this checkbox, the system ignores double quotes in your import file. If you select the checkbox, the system treats double quotes as a text delimiter.

Enterprise 2.0

• As of the 135 release, users who have administrator permissions in Enterprise 2.0 edition accounts can move emails, templates, and data extensions between folders, even if the administrator did not originally create the item being moved.
• With the 135 Release, you can fully manage (create, change properties of, delete, etc) business units for your Enterprise 2.0 account using the Web Service API. This means that all of the functionality for managing your business units that has always been available through the application interface is now available to the API.

New System Alerts

• Previously, when a task in a program referenced a user-initiated send interaction in which the email content had been deleted, the program would not return an error, but instead continue to try to execute. With this release, the program is put in an error state and the system sends you an error notification to let you know that the program is not completely properly.
• With this release, we have added a system alert to the Lived Ads to warn you if the data extension that contains the ad impression is deleted. A similar warning has also been added if the data extension is deleted that contains the information being used in Omniture Test & Target.

API Changes

Several new enhancements take their place as part of our web service API with the 135 release The API enhancements will allow you to use the API to accomplish the following tasks:

Respect of UTC and Time Zone Date Formats for Inbound Web Service Operations
The web service API now normalizes all incoming dates and times to server time. This includes the UTC time format. You can set time zone information in your account and have it resolve correctly with the ExactTarget application.

Enterprise 2.0 Account Management Features (beta)
The new API enhancements allow you to manage business units, account users, roles, and permission sets via the API. You can use API calls to create, retrieve, update, or delete these entities. Note that you can only manage permission sets at this time; granular control of individual permissions will be introduced in future updates.

Email Content Enhancements
You can use the API to retrieve content areas from the ExactTarget application. This allows you to create a content editing interface for use by your company or account users. This enhancement supports retrieval of static content areas associated with an email.

The API also allows you to send text-only emails. These emails override subscriber preferences and send only text emails with no HTML formatting to all subscribers on a list.

Publication and Suppression List Support using ListClassification
You can use the API to create, retrieve, update, or delete publication and suppression lists for your email sends. This allows you greater control over who receives your messages and uses the flexibility of the API service to better manage your subscribers.

Import Definition Enhancements
The API enhancements also introduce a new type of import called ColumnBased. A column-based import has a control column that determines if records are added, updated and deleted. This flexibility makes it easy to support delta file processes.

Other enhancements that allow data of different formats to be imported include the ability to change the end-of-line representation of a file, the representation of what NULL data is, and the ability to remove our standard quoted-string handling.

Data Extension Imports using DataExtensionObjects
The API now handles over-the-wire imports of data into a data extension in a more efficient manner. Batches of DataExtensionObjects are batched upon import and process more quickly, improving the response time of the API call.

Customer Key Allowed on the List object
You can now use a customer key to work with marketing lists via the API when used . You can create, retrieve, update, and delete using the customer key.

File Triggers (beta)
You can use file triggers (FileTrigger) to cause the API to take action by placing files with manifests on an FTP location. These file triggers look for the presence of new files and take the appropriate action once the files have been located. File triggers are available in limited release and require authorization by ExactTarget to use.

Web Service Authentication
Currently, the ExactTarget application uses plaintext SOAP username tokens over SSL for API calls. The API enhancements allow you to encrypt the username token using a certificate. You can use this encryption to secure your SOAP messages at the message level.

New AMPscript Functions

Several new AMPscript functions have been added, including the following.

• SystemDateToLocalDate
• LocalDateToSystemDate
• StringToDate
• StringToHex
• MD5
• DateParse
• DirectTwitterMessage
• UpdateTwitterStatusByJob
• UpdateTwitterStatus
• GUID
• AuthenticatedEmployeeNotificationAddress
• AuthenticatedEmployeeUserName
• AuthenticatedEmployeeID
• AuthenticatedMemberName
• AuthenticatedMemberID
• AuthenticatedEnterpriseID
• ExecuteFilterOrderedRows
• ExecuteFilter

Feature Availability

1. The Simplified Landing Pages feature, which was introduced into iLabs in the Winter 2009 Release, is now generally available to customers who have purchased microsites. Contact ExactTarget if you are interested in enabling this feature in your account.
2. The ability to populate Lead and Contact data directly into your Dynamics CRM using Smart Capture instance was introduced into iLabs in the Spring 2009 Release. This feature is now generally available if you use ExactTarget for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Contact ExactTarget if you are interested in enabling this feature in your account.
3. The ability to set the priority on a triggered send has been in limited availability since March 2009. With this release, this feature is now generally available. Contact ExactTarget if you are interested in enabling this feature in your account. There may be an additional charge for some priorities of sends.
4. Impression Tracking, which was introduced into iLabs with the Summer 2009 Release, has had unlimited spots made available. If you tried to access Impression Tracking through iLabs before and found that it was already full, you can now access this feature.

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