EFI DirectSmile Cross Media v7.0
We are happy to introduce version 7.0 of EFI DirectSmile Cross Media.
The main feature of this release is the brand new Marketing Portal, which allows you to run unlimited number of marketing portals and literally run your very own marketing cloud.
We also added some new and helpful features and tools, and continued improving usability, functionality, performance, security, stability and the integration of extensions.
We are happy to report that the new version will be available starting October 20th 2015. However, should you require this version earlier, please feel free to contact us.
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Creating Marketing Portals
This feature enables service providers to create unlimited number of Marketing Portals for their clients. With a simple and friendly user interface, the clients can simply customize and edit templates to a limited extend, execute and track their campaigns on a regional level, without any intervention from the service provider.
With this tool you can literally run your own private marketing cloud. This way you can provide your clients a much more efficient and cost saving way to handle data driven communications.
No technical skills required
Marketing Portals can be build and used without technical skills. Neither HTML nor scripting is required. Complex marketing apps can be build via drag and drop. This is a unique feature in the marketing automation world.
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Why using Marketing Portals?
Marketing Portals reduce costs through self service
- Layout adoption cost
- Data handling costs
- Campaign execution costs
Marketing Portals increase performance
- Personalization across all channels made easy
- Real time analytics are provided out of the box
- Flexibility allows to cover any kind of direct marketing tasks with campaign templates
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Your clients, sales organizations or regional offices can easily adapt or translate ready made multi channel campaigns.
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Each user can easily upload, manage and filter his own contact list.
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With the marketing dashboard you can get an overview on the performance and response rates of your campaigns.
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Server-wide Administration
Version 7.0 comes with a new level of managing users, roles, campaign templates, document templates, skins, categories and image assets. This management is only accessible by the server owner.
Users
A new type of portal users can be created. Those users have their own shared account but don't have access to the Designer itself. This enables you to create an unlimited amount of portal user accounts with no extra cost.
Roles
Roles control users' accesibility to templates and categories. Users can have one or many roles which assign certain campaign or document templates to be used (i.e. installed) by them.
Categories
You can arrange campaign templates, document templates and images in different categories. You can then assign categories to roles, in order to control users' accesibility to the categories.
Campaign Templates
Version 7.0 comes with a server-wide storage for campaign templates. These templates are accessible by the Marketing Portal or via APIs only. Campaign templates are just templates and become real campaigns by installing them on a certain account. Portal users can install, customize and run the campaigns direct from the Portal.
Document templates
Document templates are single VDP-Online documents, which can replace a certain document in a campaign template during installation on a Portal user account. This is handy if you want to offer a campaign where only the print part changes. So you can, for example, have 500 different direct mail pieces that run in the same campaign.
Skin Management
You can easily create custom designed portals and even assign your own URLs to them. You can change and edit the texts and styles (colors, fonts etc.) of the UI for each portal.
Images
Version 7.0 features a server-wide image library, which allows you to upload image resources of any kind (PNG, EPS, TIF, PDF, SVG, JPG etc.) and assign them to categories. Those categories are shown later to the portal user to pick an image. The advantage is that if you, for example, provide 100 different images for a certain campaign, the server does not have to install them all.
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Editable Campaign Templates
This feature allows you to create editable Campaign Templates for all media types - web pages, emails, documents etc. Campaign Templates allow service providers to define certain areas within the media types, that users will be able to customize later on in their Marketing Portal. Allowing the customization of only certain areas restricts users from changing key components of the campaign, for example a brand logo and colors or key messaging.
In combination with the Marketing Portal, campaign templates also enable service providers to create a campaign only once, and allow his customers to execute the campaign through the Marketing Portal as often as they wish.
Note, that the Inline Editing feature comes with a set of new Extension Items, that are required in order to build Campaign Templates.
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Cross Media APIs enable you to integrate all Cross Media features in your own web application. It’s a restful web API that can be easily used from javascript and other languages. Cross Media campaigns can be integrated in e-commerce systems as products.
CrossMedia APIs (JSON) Documentation
- Technical documentation
- Examples
New Data Relation APIs (JSON)
Click here for documentation >>
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The new Contacts Database allows you to create and manage an account-unique database espcially for your contacts. This is pefect for building a mini CRM per account. You can add or edit contacts manually, or import a database file (xlsx, csv, mdb, txt etc.).
This database can also be found in the Cross Media Designer under the name DSMXContactsDatabase. Through the Marketing Portal, users can create, import, update, delete and filter their contacts. The new or edited records will be written into the DSMXContactsDatabase of the current account.
Main Attributes
- Fixed structure with type defined fields
- Build-in dublette check
- Comes with HTML 5 contacts editor
- New dedicated statistic method
- Cross Campaign Analysis of activities
- A must database for portal campaign templates
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Export and Import Image Personalization Sets as Part of Campaigns
A time and effort saving feature available from version 7.0: you can now export and import campaigns together with the Image Personalization Sets that associated with them.
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The following new Extension Items are now available:
Editable Data Table Extension
Allows you to easily manage your contacts list and add records to the database.
Conditional Validation
This Extension Item is useful when you need to only validate parts of forms. You can easily mark form elements you do not want do validate dynamically. Click for More info and download >>
Browse and install Extension Items >>
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New Options in Extention Item Properties
New options were added to the Extention Item Properties screen:
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New rendering mode
Extension Items have a new rendering mode: “No Layout Support”. This Mode ensures that no additional HTML is added to the DOM.
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New {{child-content}} tag
In combination with the {{child_content}} tag which allows you to render children in your own HTML contruct you get the full control of hierarchical Extension Item rendering. You can go even further and select a range of allowed child items for the “{{child_content}}”.
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Those allowed children will be shown in the Extension Item panel to make it easier for the user:
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New way to determine if an image parameter has width or height set
With the condition statement {{IF image.Height}} you can now vary the rendering depending on, if an image parameter has width or height set.
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New option for style parameters: ID
The style parameter exposes the style ID for greater control on style modifications.
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new <Header /> html section
Extension Items have a new <Header /> html section. This will be directly rendered to the header of the page. This option is only available for "once per page" Extension Items.
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New Features in VDP-Online
New features were added to the VDP-Online Editor for enhanced usability and functionality.
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Layers
Layers allow you to arrange items on a document and to apply switches to them and/or enable/disable them.
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HTML to PDF
You can now place web pages on a printed (PDF) document using a simple Drag and Drop interface.
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Page Flow
You can now place a website on a VDP-Online Document and generate as many pages as needed to print the entire website.
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New Features and Improvements in VDP-Web
Some changes were made in the VDP-Web Editor and new features and functionality were brought in:
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Extended constraints for VDP Web editing
You can now define a lock-in area and force elements to this area only. You can also lock position of elements, disable or anable resizing and rotation of elements, prevent users from deleting and/or cutting elements and restrict elements to a certain style (text elements only).
New image upload and library functionality
Allows users to upload images and arrange them in categories. To use this functionality, an editor Extension Item is required.
More info about VDP-Web Extention Items >>
Class Name attribute for all items
Makes it easy to access certain objects via VDP-Web API.
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The new VDP Web Editor for text elements
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The new VDP Web Editor for images
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Support for late binding variables
As of version 7, the VDP-Web Editor supports late binding ("curly") variables. Curly variables allows you to see the variable name instead of the variable output by using curly brackets - {{YourVariable}}
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VDP-Web no longer supports V5 Rendering mode together with Internet Explorer
As of version 7, VDP-Web will no longer support the Version 5 Rendering mode together with Internet Explorer.
Vdp-Web will require from now on Internet Explorer version 9 or higher.
In case you see warning in IE please do the following:
(1) Open your campaign
(2) Turn off the V5 rendering (See screenshot)
(3) Press “save all” in the "Campaign" menu
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Other Improvements
Massive improvements for html text display and editing, multiple fixed style support.
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If you add the parameter "dsmx_test_mode=1" to a URL, DSMX will not record any events (like visited, clicked, submitted etc.). This allows you test your campaign as many times as you want, without messing up the statistics.
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Uploading custom Web Fonts can now be done quicker much easier. This option is available under the "Fonts" tab (formerly "GoogleFonts" tab). Of course, the option to add Google WebFonts is still available.
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Absolute or Relative Timeline
A new feature was added to the Campaign Manager: you can now decide whether you want to run your campaign on a relative timline (day 1... day 2... etc.) or with absulute dates. This way you gain better control on your campaign's lifecycle.
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Management of Unsubcribers List Using Data Relation
A new Data Relation for E-mail unsubscribers is now available and provides full control to manage, import and export unsubscribers.
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You can now receive and track incoming E-mails from customers, using SendGrid's inbound parse. These e-mails are generated when customers reply directly to the sending address, using the "Reply" option on their e-mail program/client.
A detailed guide on how to set up the inbound parse can be found in our user manual (Chapter Bounce Management > SendGrid Inbound Parse).
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Write "Campaign Completed" Event
You can now set up a button or a page action as "Campaign Completed", which will write a campaign complition record to the database. This gives you a better and easier way to track and monitor the performance of your campaigns.
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A new LpLogin schema (ColumsPlusRandomNumber) allows you to generate LpLogins with two databse columns and a random 4 digits number by default.
The LpLogin URL will look like this: http://yourdomain.com/CampaignName/1sColumn.2ndColumn1234
Special characters (e.g. spaces or Chinese symbols) are now allowed in LpLogin.
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Overwrite "From" Address for a better Bounce Management
This option allows you to overwrite the "from" address with the address of our Bounce Server. So, when your customers reply direcly to the sending address of the Email, the reply will be captured by the Bounce Server. This way you can be sure you won't lose or miss any reply.
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Another way to improve your bounce management: you now have the option to collect the replies to your SMS messages. The replies will be stored as a record in the database. Note that this option must be configured first before you can use it.
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A new Quick Filter tool allows you to perform a quick search for certain records in the database.
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You can now colorize PNG images by simply changing the image name.
This is how it works: if you have for example a png file with the name "image.png", simply change the image name to "rgb_ff00ff_image.png".
The result is a transparent PNG with only one color (ff00ff). The image information goes to the alpha channel (transparency).
This feature works in all media types as well as in VDP-Web and VDP.
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- 64 Bit support (front- and backend) and Performance optimizations
- IT-Improvements: Running without a user being logged in
- Transient fault handling for database connections
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