Growing up, I wanted to be a teacher or a veterinarian or a ‘lunch lady.’ To me, these careers sounded awesome, and the people that held these positions were my heroes. Never, ever, did I utter the words, “I want to be an Eloqua expert.” Maybe that’s because the platform didn’t exist at the time, but where I’m going with this is that I would not have predicted that, as an adult, I would get excited for a product release for Oracle Eloqua. But, I sure do!
Oracle Eloqua has changed the frequency of their releases from quarterly to twice a quarter to offer their new product capabilities sooner. They have also broken their rollouts into two categories: Oracle Eloqua platform versions and Oracle Eloqua Apps/Sales Tools versions. What does this mean for the end-user? If you’re anything like me, a higher frequency of release excitement!
The most recent platform release is Version 470. The rollout dates were:
March 31, 2015 (POD2)
April 12, 2015 (POD3)
April 19, 2015 (POD1)
Now that the release has been rolled out to all Pods, I thought I’d take a moment to express my enthusiasm for some of the updates.
Highlight 1:
As a customer administrator, you can manage permissions on Contact and Account Views to control what fields and data users are able to see on a record.
Translation: Administrators can create specific Views of Account and Contact records in which only the fields of interest to a particular user are displayed. With this update, a general user cannot edit a View and therefore, cannot change a View that another user finds valuable as is. Rather, a general user should contact their administrator to create a dedicated View for their use.
Highlight 2:
A new and improved visual click-through report is available. You can now see more visually which links in your email are getting the most activity.
Translation: The visual click-through report is back and improved! This report originated in the E9 version of Oracle Eloqua. E9 users that migrated to E10 have been asking for this report for years. It was released a few months ago, but didn’t work all that well. It has now been re-done and re-released. One note, users still have to add a unique query string to links that are used several times in an email so that they can be tracked correctly.
This feature is currently under controlled availability. To request access, log in to My Oracle Support and create a service request. Another important note is that the Visual Click-through Report will not track links created before March 1, 2015, but it can if a user manually updates their old assets by opening and re-saving emails.
Highlight 3:
You now have the ability to exclude form submissions from your reporting.
Translation: Test data can be removed from form data. Amazing! Prior to this update, all form submissions were included in Form submission data exports and reporting. Now users can remove any form submissions they do not want included in an export or reporting. To do this, navigate to the Form Submission Data area within a Form, right click on the form submission you want to exclude and select ‘Exclude From Reporting.’ By default, only customer administrators and advanced marketing users can do this action.
Highlight 4:
SFDC Contact ID, SFDC Lead ID, and SFDC Account ID are now case sensitive anywhere they are used.
Translation: If a customer is using 15-digit SFDC IDs in their integration, Oracle Eloqua does a better job of matching on those IDs for integration purposes because it now takes into account the case type of each digit. Also, if you are filtering for a record using a SFDC ID as your criteria, Oracle Eloqua will query more accurately.
In my opinion, these are the standout updates. With an increased frequency schedule, Oracle Eloqua is narrowing their focus for each release, which makes it easier for users to keep track of all the new things.
The best resource to keep tabs on what is included in each release is the Release Resource Center on Topliners. Here, you will find detailed documentation, release notes and webinar recordings about what the release includes. We’re doing our best to keep up and provide the highlights from our perspective, so keep checking our blog for the ‘spark notes’ version of Oracle Eloqua releases.
If you have Eloqua and you need support with any of it’s new features, please contact us! We love helping companies transform their marketing automation.
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