Microsoft Social Engagement 2016 Update 1.4

Microsoft Social Engagement 2016 Update 1.4 is ready and will be released in April 2016. This article describes the features, fixes, and other changes that are included in this update.

New features introduced in Microsoft Social Engagement 2016 Update 1.4

Update 1.4 introduces the following features:

• Introducing custom tags
  With our last release, we introduced intention tags; a set of predefined tags that are automatically added to posts based on author intent. We're extending the capabilities of the tags feature with custom tags. In addition to intention tags, you can now manually add one or more custom tags to posts. Custom tags allow you to freely choose the tag names and the posts you want to add them to. Tags come in very handy when you want to provide additional context to posts, highlight important announcements, build triage queues, and enable a more detailed structuring of your data set. You can also filter posts by custom tags to narrow your analysis, or define streams based on them.
  The Tags widget was also updated to reflect the number of posts with custom tags. Check it out on Analytics > Conversations and understand at a glance how the tags are distributed in your data set.
• New source: Forums
  Forums are digital discussion boards on the Internet where people discuss all kinds of topics. Understanding your audience requires listening to what is on their minds. Great ideas often arise from lively discussions, and forums give you a great way to reach them and find out what people think about topics that matter to your business.
  Find out what customers are saying on a variety of public Internet forums. Social Engagement offers forums as a new source so you can better understand the topics and issues you come across in forum discussions. Keyword searches on forums can help you gather relevant posts for your search topics. To start using this new source, either set up a new search topic or edit an existing search topic and include Forums in the source of your keyword rule.
  Some forums provide location data, so their posts can show as part of the Location Insights widget, or on an activity map. Check out your location data on Analytics > Locations to find out where the authors of the forum posts are located.
• Stream social data to Microsoft Azure Event Hubs
  Using Microsoft Azure Event Hubs—a highly scalable publish-subscribe event ingestor that handles millions of events per second—you can transform and store social data for further processing. Specify an automation rule in Social Engagement and stream all posts that match this rule as events to a connected event hub. Once you have the data in the event hub, you can access it from any application that you connect to your event hub.
  When Social Engagement sends a social post as an event to Azure Event Hubs, a JSON payload is submitted to the connected event hub. Along with the default properties of the post, you can define custom key-value pairs to add when you set up the automation rule for a given data set to create custom analytics scenarios and advanced reporting capabilities.
• React to a public conversation with a private message
  Conversations on Twitter usually start on public timelines of individual users. Especially with support requests, additional information is often required (for example a billing number, or a real name confirmation). This additional information usually isn’t intended for the public and needs to be shared in a private way. Social Engagement now lets you add a link to start a private conversation to any public reply on Twitter. This lets you turn any public conversation into a private one, without losing the context.

Issues that are resolved in Microsoft Social Engagement 2016 Update 1.4

In addition to the new features, Update 1.4 addresses the following issues and improvements:

• Fixed an issue on Search-Setup when a search topic category could not be deleted if the user owning this category was removed before.
• Fixed and issue when un-sharing streams in Social Center with users failed. When a stream is shared with only one user and user is removed manually, the stream is saved as expected.
• Fixed a layout issue on Settings >Social Profiles where buttons to add profiles or check tokens where cut-off when using Safari browser.
• Improved layout handling in Analytics. When opening a post list in Analytics while the filters are expanded, the filter dialog now closes and displays the post list in focus.
• Improved usability of the custom date picker. Only valid dates can be selected in the custom date picker. These are dates that reach 2 years back from today to today.
• Improved feedback messaging when publishing posts from Social Center failed. The feedback message is now displayed immediately.
• Improved feedback messaging when authenticating social profiles in Settings > Social Profiles. When a connection to a service for authentication is interrupted, the feedback message now displays the details to the user.
• Extended date and number format handling: when changing the settings for date or number format in Settings > Global Settings, the values apply to all widget numbers and date formats consistently.
• Added support for discovering CRM Online instances in the new CRM datacenter located in India. You can now select India from the Location drop-down when adding a new CRM Online connection from Settings -> Connections -> Microsoft Dynamics CRM to automatically discover CRM Online instances in that location.
• Improved handling and messaging for CRM Online instances located in the North America 2 datacenter that are not supported for the Link to CRM Action in the Automation Rules. CRM Online instances located in the North America 2 location are automatically excluded from the CRM Instances drop-down list and a message is shown to inform the user.