Microsoft Dynamics Marketing 2016 Update 0.1. As usual, the update will be applied automatically, but your local administrator can control when your organization will be updated. This is an incremental update that delivers a few new features, plus scalability and performance enhancements. The online help will be updated very soon.
Option to treat upcoming (not ready to start) tasks as active or inactive
All tasks in Dynamics Marketing include a Status field, to track a task as it travels from creation to completion. One special status is Not Ready to Start. Use this status to mark a task that is part of a series of tasks to be completed in sequence (as part of a job), and which should wait for a previous task to complete before starting. When the previous task in a sequence is marked as completed (or canceled), then the next task is automatically updated from Not Ready to Start to Not Started, which means that task’s prerequisites are complete and the task is ready to start.
By default, Not Ready to Start tasks are considered inactive, which means those are hidden in the standard list view unless you choose to view inactive tasks. When the status gets changed to Not Started, the task is then considered active and is visible by default. This makes it easy to find your most important and relevant task. Configure your site so that Not Ready to Start tasks are considered active (and thus visible by default in your task list). Your choice for this setting should be based on how your organization uses the tasks feature.
Administrators set this option in the Task Options section of the Site Settings page. ( Configure site settings, Manage tasks)
Note: This new setting also affects new-task alerts, which can be sent to users when a task assigned to them becomes active (or is created in an active state). If you set Not Ready to Start tasks as active, then users who have a new-task alert configured could receive alerts for tasks with start dates that are actually days, weeks, or even months into the future.
Customized landing page category values
For landing page fields that display as drop-down lists (categories), choose which of the available values to include for each drop-down list on the page. This lets you fine-tune each of landing pages by removing drop-down values that are not appropriate for a given context. All values are included by default.
Option to restrict permission to delete contacts
Administrators can configure Dynamics Marketing to prevent most users from deleting contacts, even when they have Edit-Contact privileges. In previous versions, and still the default setting, all users who can edit contacts can also delete. (Edit Marketing privileges enable this for marketing contacts, while Edit Site Contacts privileges enable this for site, vendor, and client contacts). Administrators can now set an option that prevents all users (other than administrators) from deleting contacts. Administrators with Edit-Contact privileges can always delete contacts. Regardless of this setting, Dynamics Marketing contacts are always soft deleted, never hard deleted. This means that deleted contacts are always kept in the database, but are marked as inactive and hidden by default.
Administrators can set this option in the Contact Options section of the Site Settings page.
New OData feeds
Dynamics Marketing now publishes even more types of data as OData feeds for use in Power BI reports, custom applications, and other OData consumers. New OData feeds available in this version include the Status field for the company and components tables, and component-related fields for several related tables.
Updated Features
Improved query logic for custom contact fields
In previous versions of Dynamics Marketing, you could not create queries (dynamic marketing lists) to find records with an empty or null value in a custom contact field. For example, if you created a custom contact field called “blood type” and created a query to find contacts where “blood type equals null”, then no results would be returned. In Dynamics Marketing 2016 Update 0.1, querying contacts where “blood type equals null” now returns all contacts that have not yet registered a blood type. This means that queries based on custom contact fields now work the same way as they do for standard contact fields.
To make sure all existing queries continue to work as expected, the new query logic will only apply to queries created after you update to Dynamics Marketing 2016 Update 0.1. Queries created in previous versions will continue to use the logic that doesn’t return results for null values.
· Custom contact fields will never be “empty”—those can only be “null”. This means you should not use the “is empty” operator to find fields without values.
· The “does not contain” operator does not return null values. When you query for contacts where “blood type does not contain ‘B’”, then you would find contacts with blood type A+, A-, O+, and O-, but you would not find contacts where the blood type is not registered. To include these, add an extra clause to create a query, such as “blood type does not contain ‘B’” or “blood type is null”. This logic is similar for the “does not equal” operator.
Azure requirements
Both the Microsoft Dynamics Marketing Connector and the SDK use Microsoft Azure to facilitate communication to and from Dynamics Marketing. Depending on your scenario, you may be able to use built-in managed queues (which are included with your Dynamics Marketing subscription), or you may need to purchase your own Azure subscription
To connect to Microsoft Dynamics CRM (on-premises), you must provide a service bus from your own Microsoft Azure subscription. The Azure subscription that you use does not necessarily need to be in the same Microsoft Office 365 tenant as Dynamics Marketing.
Browser
Dynamics Marketing is a cloud-based service that requires no special software running on users’ computers, other than an up-to-date web browser.
Pop-Ups: You must configure your browser to allow all pop-up windows from your Dynamics Marketing domain (see your browser’s documentation for instructions). Most modern web browsers block all pop-ups by default. Some browsers alert you when they block a pop-up window (for example by showing an icon in the address bar), but others do not. Some, but not all, of Dynamics Marketing print and file-upload features use a pop-up window of a type sometimes blocked by pop-up blockers.
Allow JavaScript from Dynamics Marketing; JavaScript must be enabled for your browser, at least for your Dynamics Marketing domain. Most browsers enable JavaScript by default.
·Allow cookies from Dynamics Marketing: Cookies must be enabled for your browser, at least for your Dynamics Marketing domain. Most browsers enable cookies by default.
