1. Overview of 1.78
1.79 is scheduled for release on 28 June 2014.
In this release, Ubiquity have made a number of enhancements to Engage as well as some security changes, bug fixes and performance improvements.
2. Engage on SSL
As part of an ongoing security programme, in this release we’ve tightened it even further.
Engage used to use SSL automatically on some pages (log in, add user and change password) but not others.
Over the last few month’s Ubiquity have slowly been migrating accounts in Engage to use SSL across the entire logged in area of Engage.
The last of the accounts have now been migrated and all new accounts will automatically be created with SSL turned on.
For the technically minded: to stop external images showing insecure content warnings we’re proxying insecure content so it loads as https. Images in CSS files won’t proxy correctly so there is a chance that some SSL warnings may still appear.
Please note that public pages will stay as they are (links to Surveys, Forms and Events). This enhancement is for the logged in area. However SSL is available for the public pages so please don’t hesitate to contact Ubiquity for more information.
3. Number of days since last email
A new option has been added to overall, mailout folder and automated mailout filters called “Days since last email”.
When filtering on this field you’ll be able to filter on how many days ago a contact last received an email.
This is especially useful for applying contact rules to your database – you can include a filter to only send a mailout to people who haven’t received an email from you recently.
For example, the filter below will send the mailout to all contacts who have never received an email, or those who have received an email but their last email was more than 7 days ago. In other words, anyone who received a mailout within the last week will be excluded.
This can ensure you’re not over-communicating with your subscribers and ensures that you continue to get a high level of engagement with your campaigns.
4. Filter Form, Event and TXT Programme reports
You can now filter form, event and TXT programme reports by date range.
This allows you to easily drill down and see how your campaign was performing at a specific time.
You can now also set the default start date of the report. If you’ve been testing your campaign before it goes live then you can automatically exclude this data from your report by setting a start date.
If a TXT message fails to get delivered, Engage will now show this as either a soft bounce or a hard bounce.
If the mobile is switched off or outside the coverage area then we’ll mark the message as a soft bounce – usually between 7 hours and a few days after the TXT was originally sent. This depends on the Telco.
A TXT will be marked as a hard bounce if that number doesn’t exist when we try and deliver the message. Engage knows about ported numbers so it is likely that the number is no longer used.
If a contact has three consecutive hard bounce TXT messages then that contact will get marked as GNA for TXT and automatically excluded from future TXT Outs.
Now you can set an expiry on both Android and iOS notifications.
This allows you to choose when a notification should expire if it hasn’t been delivered to the phone e.g. if a user has their phone turned off.
| Dates for Opt Outs and GNAs
We now track opt out and GNA dates for contacts so you can easily see these without having to view each person’s contact history.
This allows you to filter on the data and is especially useful when needing to extract recent opt outs for updating in an external system. Automated processes will also be able to use these fields. Note: for contacts who are already opted out or GNA’d before this change goes live we’ll take a best guess and insert this into the field. Those contacts we don’t have a best guess for will have a blank date. |
| Mark Field as Invalid via Form Validation
You can now mark a field as invalid using form validation.
This is especially useful for forms that display error messages inline, rather than at the top. For the technically minded: this easily allows you to check values entered into a field match a custom regex e.g. “Phone number contains regex:^d+$”. |
| Link Between Articles
You can now easily create a link from one article in your email template to another article. Simply go into the text area in one article and add an anchor (symbolised by the flag icon). This is where you will link to.
You can then link to that anchor from elsewhere in the email template.
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| Default Copy Name Tweak
When you copy something in Engage the default name now puts “- Copy” on the end rather than “Copy of” at the beginning like it used to.
If “- Copy” is already taken Engage will add a version number at the end so the names will remain concise. This also means that when sorting alphabetically the copies will now sit next to the original. |
8. Tweaks and Bug Fixes
| General |
|---|
| When new users log in for the first time they would sometimes get an error. This has now been fixed. |
| Database |
| Filtering using the Is In and Is Not In conditions will no longer error if you paste in more than 2,000 options. They should also be a little faster too. |
| When filtering using a “Contains” condition, if you accidentally had a space at the end of the value you type in Engage was including this in the search and only including those contacts whose value also included a space. Trailing spaces will now get trimmed off when using the “Contains” condition to work the same as other filter conditions. |
| Imports |
| Doing an update import on a contact from a survey that has partial responses had the potential to update the wrong contact in Engage. This has now been fixed. |
| Doing an import to update transactional data when you had duplicate transactions in the data file was not returning the correct error message. This has now been fixed. |
| If a mailout fails part way through generating the emails it will now show the mailout status as Failed, rather than getting stuck on Sending. |
| Sometimes you wouldn’t be able to filter on specific mailouts as only the Link filter options would appear in the filter dialog. This has now been fixed. |
| Cancelling a mailout before all the emails have been generated will no longer timeout on large accounts. |
| Emails that soft-bounced will now get the Email Send Date field populated. |
| If you add a saved filter to a mailout report then rename that saved filter, it will now show the new name on the mailout report. |
| Forms |
| When editing a field is set to be a Hidden Field the label editor will now correctly be hidden. |
| Survey |
| Previously if you reordered questions on Page 2+ of a survey then the numbering on that page would show up as Page 1. This should now show the correct page number. |
| Same page logic wasn’t working correctly when there were spaces at end of the option’s response value. Spaces at the end will now automatically be removed and the logic will work correctly. |
| The survey report dropdown where you add survey questions to the report now shows the survey question names if they have been set. |
| If you download survey responses and select the option to include selected database fields but don’t actually choose any then it will no longer error. |
| If you add $0 or $1 into a radio button list it will now display correctly. |
| Copying survey (and form/event) questions and pages should now be consistent – the newly copied item will appear directly after the original. |
| When you move a survey page all the page numbers no longer disappear from the page selector dropdown. |
| When copying an existing triggered email, triggered emails from deleted surveys will no longer be listed. |
| Deleting survey responses when viewing complete responses will no longer delete incomplete responses as well, and vice versa. |
| View printable version of a survey will now show the display text of the option in any logic, rather than the response value. |
| Survey history will now record when a response gets deleted. |
| The question text box will now auto-expand to fit the question rather than having a really small box with a scroll bar. This change has been made everywhere in Engage where you can edit and format text. |
| Event |
| Delete responses dialog now shows the correct number of responses that will get deleted. |
| The confirm and cancel registration buttons when viewing event registrations now work correctly again. |
| Push |
| Push notifications were failing when the content included Microsoft Word characters (e.g. curly apostrophes). These will now get replaced with standard characters which will send correctly. |
| Insight |
| Reordering items in Insight no longer breaks if you’ve deleted an item. |
| Layouts |
| First line of CSS from the custom CSS tab is now getting correctly applied when the layout is used for an event. |