Microsoft Social Engagement 2016 Update 1.7

Microsoft Social Engagement 2016 Update 1.7 is ready and will be released in July 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 1.7

Update 1.7 introduces the following features:  

• Introducing Instagram as a new source in Social Engagement 
  Instagram is now available as a source in Social Engagement, adding a way to engage on highly-relevant pictures and short videos from millions of posts published every day.
  
  To gather posts that mention a specific hashtag, you can create keyword search rules for #hashtags on Instagram to find public posts on Instagram that contain that hashtag.
  
  To follow all posts of important Instagram accounts (for example, a competitor’s brand account), you can set up Instagram account rules to gather all posts from a specific Instagram account.
  
  To acquire data from Instagram, you'll need to add at least one Instagram profile to your social profiles in Social Engagement, and then allow data acquisition for that profile.
• Link to CRM is now available for Professional licenses
  We’re excited to announce that all customers using Microsoft Dynamics CRM in combination with Social Engagement can now create CRM entities from a post in Social Engagement. Users with a Professional license can now link a post to CRM and trigger a workflow in CRM. While users with a Microsoft Social Engagement Professional license now can create new records in Microsoft Dynamics CRM from single posts, the automated record creation using automation rules continues to be available for Enterprise licenses only.
• New and faster acquisition of posts from Facebook pages
  Social Engagement has significantly improved the data freshness of posts and comments from Facebook pages. To start using the new data acquisition, you need to add at least one Facebook acquisition profile to the social profiles in Social Engagement. Authenticated Facebook acquisition profiles generate a User Access token on Facebook. Tokens authenticated for data acquisition usually have a lifetime of about 60 days, due to Facebook's requirements. Administrators and profile owners will receive email notifications when a profile is about to expire.
• Multi-creation of search rules and filtering on search
  To improve the experience when you set up new search rules, Social Engagement now lets you set up multiple Twitter search rules and Facebook pages rules at one time. Create a new Twitter or Facebook rule, and then search for the Facebook pages or Twitter profiles you want to add under the current search topic.
  
  To quickly find search topics or search rules that contain a specific word or phrase, you can now apply a filter in the Category and Search Topics pane. Start typing the string that you're looking for and see all topics or rules matching what you type. Additionally, you can search for languages and sources in the search topic configuration and search for custom sources on the customer sources tab.
• Manage custom tags
  Some tags may become obsolete over time, or you might want to rename them. Maintain your custom tags and let your users work with relevant items. Administrators can now rename custom tags and delete them if they aren’t needed anymore.
• Review the quality of auto tags
  Having insights about the quality and history of the learning models for auto tags and intentions helps you efficiently manage and optimize the auto tags feature. In Settings, on the Auto Tags page, you'll now find information about the quality of the machine learning model for each auto tag.
• Include or exclude the Label filter
  You can now build streams in Social Center that cover a variety of workflows by using the updated Labelfilter. The label filter now lets you choose if you want the see posts that have the selected label assigned, or if you want to explicitly see posts that don’t have the selected label assigned.
  
  For example, you could work with labels like “Closed” or “Case resolved” and filter out those labels in a stream that shows posts assigned to a group of users, so they work on the posts that still require action.
• Automatically assign posts to a user or a group by using automation rules
  Further extending the capabilities for automated triage of newly-found posts, automation rules now provide the Assign-toaction. Based on the filters you define, posts are automatically assigned to a user or a group.
  
  For example, you can assign posts with purchase intentions to your sales team for follow-up. Or, you can assign posts with negative sentiment that mention your company’s service or product to your customer service team.
  
  To quickly check the number of posts that are processed by an automation rule, Social Engagement now shows how many posts might match your filters. When you define the filters, you'll see how many posts previously matched the selected filters in your default time frame, so you can see if that’s within your expectations. Additionally, the actions for each automation rule are now displayed in a list so you can easily edit them.
• Direct messages and private messages now support up to 10,000 characters
  Direct messages on Twitter and private messages on Facebook now support up to 10,000 characters per message and let you write longer replies to your audience. You'll be notified if you're about to reach the character limit.
• Details for Twitter posts now show threads for replies and retweets
  To help you better understand the impact or the context of a post, the detailed view of a Twitter post now shows replies and retweets as separate threads. Replies are now related to the posts they reply to, rather than being treated as individual posts.
• New options to handle posts that no longer match a stream’s data set
  In Social Center, streams now let you choose how to handle posts that no longer match a stream's data set. You can either let the stream automatically hide these posts, or you can choose to be notified in the stream before a post is hidden. Not only does this let you work more efficiently when you triage posts, it also lets you work with posts faster.

Issues that are resolved in Microsoft Social Engagement 2016 Update 1.7

In addition to the new features, Update 1.7 addresses the following issues and improvements:

• Fixed an issue where Facebook user profiles that were shared with group didn’t show in Search Setup for Private Messages.
• Fixed an issue where users with the user role Power Analyst couldn’t access Custom Sources in Search Setup.
• Social Engagement now shows notifications when you have unsaved changes in the configuration for an alert and try to navigate to another page. The same applies to the configuration for activity maps.
• Fixed the display of icons for small screens on widgets in the Analytics area.
• Fixed a scrolling issue in activity maps which enables you to access the threading buttons.
• The file size for publishing images to Facebook is now limited to 15 MB.
• Introduced a fixed header to the detailed view of posts. The action buffer and error notification now display independently from the position you scrolled to.
• When adding keywords to your filters, Social Engagement now informs you when you add the same keyword twice.
• When reading a thread of Twitter private messages, the UI now shows the entire content of each post. You can now expand Twitter private messages when viewing the details of a post.