1. Overview of 1.75
Ubiquity have come up with a wide range of new updates in release 1.75. 1.75 is scheduled to be released on 8 February 2014. The update will occur on Saturday morning at 6:00am and should be completed by 7:00am. This is when Engage is at its lowest usage.
This is the biggest release in over a year and includes faster email sending, user history and the ability to add database fields via forms.
There are also many interface tweaks and bug fixes.
Have ideas for Engage? We would love to hear them – just contact us.
2. Faster Email Sending
Ubiquity have made some updates to sending emails, so now your email will be sent faster than ever before.
Previously, you may have noticed that after sending your mailout the total messages number would slowly increase – this was Engage creating each email. Only when this step was complete and every email had been created would Engage start sending emails. For large mailouts this meant it could take a while before the first email was sent out the door.
Engage will now start sending emails concurrently while creating them. You’ll notice that the first email will be sent out the door much earlier than it used to be. This change also means a reduced overall send time, especially for large mailouts.
3. User History
Engage now records user history. Whenever a user is edited (e.g. their email address, mobile number, permissions) the change will get written to the history.
Previously there was no way of knowing why a user had been deactivated, and therefore whether it was ok to reactivate them. Now, when you deactivate a user you will be asked the reason for this, which will then be written to the history.
4. Forms Fields
You can now add fields to your database when editing a form which makes setting up forms a lot faster.
Also, when creating subscribe or subscribe/update forms you previously needed to manually add all mandatory fields that didn’t have default values to the form before Engage would allow you to save it. To make things easier, Ubiquity have changed this so that when you create a new subscribe or subscribe/update form, Engage will automatically add these fields for you.
5. Other Minor Enhancements
| Other Minor Enhancements: |
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| The recent accounts dashboard widget has been updated so you can now favourite accounts. This makes it easier to jump to those accounts used most often.
This widget can be added to your dashboard through the manage widgets screen. |
| The numeric field types in Engage were previously labelled “Integer” and “Real Number”. Often these caused a bit of confusion, so we’ve renamed them to “Whole Number” and “Decimal Number”.
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| Time fields used to have a dropdown of every single minute in the day so were rather long and unwieldy. We have now bought these inline with the date and date/time fields to have a specialised picker, which should be easier to use.
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| Import errors used to download as a .txt file, you’d then have to then manually open this in Excel to have them in a user-friendly format. Errors will now download as a .csv file instead.
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| Previously, if you were updating or segmenting large numbers of contacts, the confirm dialog would hang for a while, while it was doing the update. For really large updates it could also sometimes timeout and return an error.
We’ve made some changes so that as soon as you start an update or segment a progress bar appears on the screen. Anyone else who tries to do an update or segment while one is in progress will also see this progress bar. Now there will be no more guessing at how long it will take, and no more errors. |
| The survey close date is now displayed on the survey summary widget. This makes it easy to see at a glance if this is correct.
Also, all widgets now have refresh buttons making it easy to make sure the information on them are up to date. |
| Sometimes people had trouble finding where to download their survey responses, so we’ve changed the link to be a button instead, to make this a bit more obvious.
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| In layouts the content HTML tab now defaults to forms as this is the most often used.
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| For the API, form field IDs and transactional table field IDs are now available by clicking on the view button beside each form/transactional table name on the API IDs page. The IDs for Email Templates have also been added as a separate section.
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6. Tweaks and Bug Fixes
| General |
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| Sometimes you could get an error trying to create or change a password that contained certain special characters such as angle brackets <>. This will now work correctly. |
| API tokens will no longer appear on the users page. |
| Database |
| When creating or renaming a field, additional special characters have now been added to the list of forbidden characters, these include things such as fancy quotes and apostrophes (e.g. ’ ‘ “) and long dashes (e.g. –). These characters do not work correctly when merging. |
| Imports |
| Some performance improvements have been made around importing data. |
| When you have a file with some import errors in (e.g. invalid email addresses), then go back to the start of the import and upload the same file again but with the errors fixed, Engage would sometimes not re-process the file as it thought the file hadn’t changed. It will now process the file again correctly. |
| Imports will now correctly remember the settings you used from the previous import. |
| Engage will now let you know if you have too many (over 200) columns in a file to be imported rather than throwing an error. |
| View online links for previews should now no longer expire after 3 days – they should wait until the full 7 days before expiring. |
| Trying to send a mailout with a form that has been deleted will now return the correct error message. |
| We’ve made some tweaks to article names (seen when reordering articles) and element names so that the names they generate should be more descriptive and relevant. |
| Emails delivered to the recipient, but where the recipient then marked it as spam (in Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo) are now being correctly included in the delivered number on the mailout widget. |
| You can now click a link in a mailout in one account that goes to a subscribe or subscribe/update form in a different account and it will show you the form without any errors. |
| Can now insert addresses from address book into triggered emails. |
| Previously if a mailout was preparing during the backup window at 10pm the mailout could sometimes fail. This has been fixed. |
| Putting angle brackets <> into the pre-header text field could sometimes generate popup errors when trying to edit an email template. This has now been fixed. |
| The dedupe condition will no longer be applied to the filter screen of automated mailouts. |
| If Google Analytics has been applied to a mailout it will automatically be applied to any new links added to the mailout, rather than having to manually add it. |
| When editing email template HTML the syntax highlighter search would only take you to the first matching result. Now you can continue to hit enter when searching and it will cycle through all the matching results. |
| Forms |
| Forms with auto-submit turned on will now correctly auto-submit when previewing the form. |
| File upload now works correctly if you add a file upload field to a form, but don’t edit it. |
| If you have a redirect set up on the outro page of a form and then come back and save this page again, you will no longer get an error. |
| The layout mode of “Without a label” will now always correctly hide the question field. |
| Survey |
| If you have a custom survey report and delete a sub question from your survey that is on your report, the report will no longer return an error. |
| Preview survey logic now re-evaluates correctly when clicking the back button. |
| Some performance improvements have been made around saving surveys and survey reports. |
| Minor interface fix for the page selector dropdown in some versions of Internet Explorer. |
| Fixes to the “Move To” dialog and also show a green confirmation message when a survey question has been moved. |
| Action buttons for Content Blocks in survey no longer appear disabled. |
| Survey post logic now only auto-collapses if the “Otherwise” condition is “Move to the next page” and not when it’s anything else. |
| If a person has started completing a survey with save and resume on, and then leaves and comes back later, if the page they were on has been deleted it will no longer throw an error – they will return to the most recently completed page that is available. |
| The survey pre-logic section has now been moved above the intro section which makes more sense as the pre-logic is run before the intro is displayed. |
| Creating/copying a survey page now gives you a green success message. |
| Event |
| Previously if an event had passed its end date you couldn’t save the settings page (e.g. to rename the event) unless you changed the date to be in the future. Engage will now only validate that the date is in the future if you actually change the date. |
| Previously when creating an event triggered email you would always get the option to only send to the primary registrant. This setting will now only appear if your event allows more than one registration per form. |
| TXT |
| Copying TXT programmes could sometimes throw an error if the inbound programme contained conditional branching. This has now been fixed. |
| Engage will no longer allow you to send a TXT Out with a disabled filter condition. You will need to remove this before saving your filter. |
| Insight |
| Charts using the combine reportables option on mailout folders will no longer throw an error. |
| Cancelled mailouts can no longer show as delivered in Insight reports. |
| Removing specific metrics from grids will no longer throw an error. |
| You can now save an Insight report that includes a database summary report. |
| Layouts |
| The default layout now uses a newer version of jQuery – the same version that Engage uses. |
| The change preview dialog will now always show the current form/survey/event that is being previewed. |
| In the layout designer, when you submit the preview form/survey/event, you used to get a browser popup every time you made a change asking if you wanted to submit the form again. This could be quite annoying. You also couldn’t get back to the original form page without going right out of the layout and back in again. Now, every time you make a change to the layout the preview will reset back to the first page without any popup dialogs. |
| If the first field of a form/survey/event was off the screen Engage would automatically scroll the user down to that field to put the cursor in it. This meant they could miss the intro copy of your page. Engage will no longer put the cursor in the first field if it is not visible on the screen, and also now has a custom JavaScript option that can be applied to turn this behaviour off altogether. |