Microsoft Dynamics Marketing 2015 Update 1 Product Documentation is Available!

***[Referencing to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Team Blog]

Here’s where to find all the new documentation available for the Microsoft Dynamics Marketing 2015 Update 1.  This update introduces new features such as Separation of service bus namespace for SDK and Connector: You can now configure Microsoft Dynamics Marketing SDK and Microsoft Dynamics Marketing Connector for Microsoft Dynamics CRM with different service bus namespaces. Microsoft-owned queues for CRM Online integration: Microsoft Dynamics Marketing now provides managed service buses for CRM Online integration. You don’t need to have a Microsoft Azure account and service bus namespace for CRM Online integration. Double opt-in for email marketing: Send an opt-in link to incoming contacts to verify them. Double opt-in helps you to maintain lead quality and remain compliant with regional regulations. Duplicate detection in email messages: Configure your instance so that email messages are delivered only once per email inbox and avoid sending multiple emails to duplicate contact records. Assets & media improvements: Tag your assets using multiple keywords and use the improved keyword based search to filter them. Expanded Analytics with Odata, Excel and Power BI: Create beautiful, informative reports based on real-time data drawn directly from Dynamics Marketing. With this release, we continue to add expanded support for more OData feeds and Power BI features—both for stand-alone Excel workbooks and for PowerBI.com. The new Dynamics Marketing connector for Power BI delivers an all-new collection of dashboard widgets that enable you to embed specially targeted graphs and views based on your Dynamics Marketing data right on your PowerBI.com dashboard. Be informed, plan strategically, and show off your results. For more information about the update, see What’s New in Microsoft Dynamics Marketing. Start here Microsoft Dynamics Marketing Help Center This central information hub gives you access to key Microsoft Dynamics Marketing content sources: Marketing Setup & Administration – The portal for Dynamics Marketing administrators! Marketing Developer Center– The resource for Dynamics Marketing developers. Marketing Help & Training – The place to find end user help and training. Community – Find answers to your questions in the Dynamics community. Support – Get support when you need it. Videos – See videos on new features on the Microsoft Dynamics Marketing YouTube channel. Information for IT pros, administrators, implementers, and customizers Marketing Setup & Administration – The portal for Dynamics Marketing administrators! Learn about: What’s new in Microsoft Dynamics Marketing 2015 Update 1 Getting ready for the next release Connecting with CRM Planning for and preparing a new instance Connecting to Microsoft Social Listening Technical articles Information for developers Marketing Developer Center – The portal for Dynamics Marketing Developers! Download Software Development Kit for Microsoft Dynamics Marketing 2015 Update 1 Learn about: What’s new for developers Marketing entities Getting started with the SDK Using sample code to get a quick start Sample code Information for end users Marketing Help & Training – The place to find end-user help and training. Videos, e-books, quick reference guides, walkthrough topics, and more. Learn about: What’s new in Microsoft Dynamics Marketing 2015 Update 1 Getting started with Microsoft Dynamics Marketing Marketing execution Using the Seller Portal to see what messages are reaching your contacts Writing reports for Microsoft Dynamics Marketing …and lots more! Thank You! More coming soon Stay tuned, and let us know in the blog comments what you think of the new content – and what you look forward to seeing in the future. Give feedback on the content.

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Enabling Social Listening for Dynamics Marketing

Enable the connection

1. Purchase Microsoft Social Listening licenses and assign them to users as needed using your Microsoft Office 365 portal.
2. Sign in to Microsoft Dynamics Marketing and go to Settings > Administration > Social Listening Options.
3. Mark the Enable Social Listening check box to turn on the feature.
4. Enter the URL for your Social Listening instance in the Social Listening Server URL field. You’ll receive the link required here in an email when you sign up for Microsoft Social Listening.
5. Configure the roles and privileges for the relevant users of Microsoft Dynamics Marketing to grant them access to Social Listening features. (Grant the View All Social Listening privilege.) For more information, see Work with user accounts and staff contacts.
6. Fold down the Additional Admin Options section and choose the Social Listening User Management link to go to the user-management page for Social Listening. From there, configure roles for the same users in Social Listening.
7. Choose the Social Listening Terms link to view the license/subscription agreement for Microsoft Social Listening and read it carefully. If you agree to its terms, then return here and mark the I agree… check box.
8. Choose Submit to save your settings.

Test your Social Listening connection

To check whether your Social Listening connection is working, try one or both of the following:

• As described in the previous procedure, go to the Social Listening Options page, fold down the Additional Admin Options section and choose the Social Listening User Management link under Configure User Roles. If the link works, then you have entered the correct URL for your Social Listening instance.
• Go to the Home page and try to add a Social Listening widget. You may be asked to sign into Social Listening. If you are able to sign in and the widget works, then your connection is fully operational.

Release Social Listening licenses

If you need to free up some Social Listening licenses, you might consider removing Social Listening access from some of your Microsoft Dynamics Marketing users. To do so, you must remove access privileges from the affected users in both Microsoft Dynamics Marketing and Social Listening and, finally, remove the licenses in your Microsoft Office 365 portal. You can now reassign the licenses.

Incremental update for Dynamics Marketing

Microsoft have added two small, but important, new features to Dynamics Marketing.

• P3P privacy policy support: This helps make sure that Dynamics Marketing website-tracking cookies will be accepted by a wider range of browsers. To use this feature, you must read, accept and enable Microsoft’s default P3P policy.More information: Cookies and privacy issues.Please refer below screenshot
• Customer-driven update (CDU): This gives admins better control over when new updates of Dynamics Marketing will be rolled out for your organization. As Microsoft Dynamics Marketing is an online service, most of the technical details of keeping it updated with the latest features and fixes are handled by Microsoft Support. However, the update process will cause a small amount of downtime (usually less than 30 minutes), and users at your organization may also need some time to get used to the new features. Therefore, user will be notified by email well in advance and are able to control the roll-out schedule for your organization’s Dynamics Marketing update so user can plan as needed and make sure that the update does not occur right in the middle of a critical event or campaign.More information on CDU: Manage Dynamics Marketing updates

For other new features introduced in the last major update of Dynamics Marketing, please refer below link

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics/marketing-customer-center/what-s-new-in-microsoft-dynamics-marketing.aspx

Microsoft Dynamics Marketing 2015 Update

The current Electra release (Fall 2014) also called Dynamics Marketing 2015 has updated few features in the process of improving the product. The update introduces new features such as:

• Improved campaign automation:
  • Create even more intelligent campaign automation with enhanced triggering logic: Your automated campaigns can now incorporate triggers that not only react to customer behavior, but also to the status of internal tasks in Dynamics Marketing. You can also design advanced triggering logic based on Boolean expressions and nested-trigger logic.
  • Create enticing campaigns with new offer management, automation and tracking features: You can create time and/or inventory-limited offers, include links to them in marketing emails and track customer response to those offers through the campaign-automation canvas.
  • Create Lync webinar events and include them in automated campaigns.
  • Automated A/B testing helps identify the most effective email designs and schedules: With automated A/B testing, Dynamics Marketing starts with a small part of your intended recipient list and sends design A to half the sample and design B to the other half. The system then monitors the performance of each version and scores them based on your criteria. When the test period is up, Dynamics Marketing sends the winning version to the rest of your list.
• Improved lead scoring

  You are now able to construct even more detailed scoring models and to apply new types of logic. For example, you can now score a lead based on an “any” operator, as in “score this lead higher if she has attended any event.” And speaking of events, you can now score leads separately based on event registration, actual attendance and even attendance at individual sessions at an event. Other lead-tracking and -scoring improvements include: improved web-page tracking (better time-on-page measurements), ability to score by sales ratings reported by an integrated Microsoft Dynamics CRM solution, and the ability to score by values from certain custom fields, which you can enable on several entities.

• Work more effectively with new UI features:
  • Overview all of your marketing activities with the new, graphical integrated-marketing calendar: Dynamics Marketing provides a Gantt-chart view of all of the marketing campaigns you are working on. You can expand any campaign to see the individual emails, landing pages, social media messages and events associated with that campaign.
  • Create visual approval workflows with the new approval canvas: You can design more advanced workflow functionality that includes parallel approvers and/or advanced acceptance criteria. You design and review your approvals using a graphical drag-and-drop canvas that is similar to the campaign-automation canvas already available in Dynamics Marketing.
  • Click to call any contact over Lync or Skype instantly.
  • Get the most out of your search-engine marketing efforts with Bing Ads integration
• Expanded integration with Microsoft CRM and Social Listening:
  • Monitor the social-media buzz about your brands and campaigns with Social Listening integration: With Microsoft Social Listening integration, you can enhance your marketing intelligence and correlate your marketing and branding initiatives with social-media activity. Add a wide variety of graphical widgets to your Dynamics Marketing home page to keep a daily eye on many aspects of social-media activity, or add similar widgets to individual campaigns and companies for a more specific focus. You are also able to configure and modify your Social Listening queries from inside Dynamics Marketing.
  • Work more effectively with sales staff with the new seller-collaboration portal: Enable your salespeople using Microsoft Dynamics CRM to access the latest details about the progress of your marketing initiatives and automated campaigns. Ensure that when sales people talk to a given customer, they are fully aware of the latest offers and other marketing communication messages that the customer has received.
  • Enriched data integration with Microsoft CRM: Dynamics Marketing administrators are now able to fine-tune the integration through expanded integration controls, including the ability to managing sync operations on a per-entity basis. New integration points include the ability to two-way sync tasks and campaigns.
• Improved segmentation and tracking:
  • Keep your campaigns on-target with improved list management.
  • Target market segments more closely with the new custom-field mechanic featuring end-to-end support
  • Landing pages can now remember previously submitted values
  • Integrated privacy statements for customers help ensure conformity with privacy regulations
• Generate even more types of analytic reports in Microsoft Excel using new, expanded OData feeds:

  With OData feeds, you can use the powerful data querying (PowerQuery, PowerPivot), spreadsheet, formatting and visualization features (PowerView, PowerMap and more) of Excel to work with data from Dynamics Marketing.

How is Microsoft Dynamics Marketing different from Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Marketing)

While trying to learn more about Microsoft Dynamics Marketing, the first question that pop-ed in my mind was how is MDM different from the Marketing module that Dynamics CRM used to have? I started trying to understand MDM by comparing it with Marketing module of CRM and that was the first mistake I made.

Marketing module in CRM has very limited features and entities as compared to MDM so again the question, how is MDM different from CRM functionally?

While searching for the answer I came across below comparison which answered my question up to an extent and found it worth sharing.

	Microsoft Dynamics Marketing	Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Marketing)
Target	Marketers	Salespeople
Usage	High volume, complex, multi-channel campaigns	Low volume, simple, single channel campaigns
Typical Requirements	Bulk, SMTP, Dynamics Email with tracking Media buying management Digital Asset Management Marketing Project Management	One-off email send (no result tracking) Simple event management

Microsoft Dynamics Marketing Connector Setup for CRM 2015

Whether you’re a corporate marketing team or an advertising agency, Microsoft Dynamics Marketing delivers powerful, integrated marketing management solutions that can help you better understand your customers. With Microsoft Dynamics Marketing you’ll get exceptional insight, control over budgets and resources, and be able to create automated, measurable multi-channel campaigns to deliver tangible results.

Microsoft Dynamics Marketing is good for marketing related activities and generating Leads while on other hand Microsoft Dynamics CRM is great for working the all sort of marketing data weather it a sales (Lead-to-Opportunity), service (activity to incident) life cycle.

Spring’ 14 brought to us Microsoft Dynamics Marketing Connector for connecting these two products and excel the business with (306)² degree view of your business. J

Microsoft Dynamics Marketing Connector for Dynamics CRM allows to:

• Connects MDM and CRM thereby allowing marketing data to be synchronized between these two applications.
• Leverages a managed solution for CRM which customizes a CRM organization to support the connector.

Pre-requisites:

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011/2013/2015
• Microsoft Dynamics Marketing
• Microsoft Azure
• Microsoft Dynamics Marketing Connector for CRM

Steps involved:

1. Download and install required connector resources
2. Check “Integration Services” for your MDM
3. Configure the MDM-CRM Connector
4. Testing

Download and install connector resources

Download required connector resources

1. Microsoft Dynamics Marketing Connector for Dynamics CRM is available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=43108
2. Select the required components from the list and download to local drive.
3. Extract the required connector.msi.

Installing the Connector

1. Navigate to where you downloaded the files, double click the file “Microsoft Dynamics Marketing 17.0.3711 – CRM Connector.msi” (In my case as I’m using CRM 2015) and Install.
2. In the dialog click Next                                                                                       
3. Read and accept the term and conditions and click next.                           
4. If required Browse to a new location for the installation files and click Next.
5. Wait for the extraction to get completed.                                                     
6. Click Finish                                                                                                             

 

7. Unless provided explicitly, the default extract location is                         

Installing the connector solution to your CRM environment

1. Open the CRM environment and navigate to Settings –> Solutions      
2. Click Import and Click Choose File
3. Navigate to the folder C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Dynamics Marketing\Connector for Microsoft Dynamics CRM and select the file DynamicsMarketingConnectorSolution_managed.zip
4. Verify you selected the correct file and click Next                                       

5. Let the import process complete
6. Click Close and verify the solution has been installed

Note: You may get below error while importing the solution if CRM 2011/2013 connector solution is selected for CRM 2015 environment.

Important: After the “Dynamics Marketing Connector for Dynamics CRM” solution is installed in your CRM, you must create/update a ‘connector user’ in CRM. This user must be assigned the “Dynamics Marketing Connector” security role. The “Dynamics Marketing Connector” security role is created when the Dynamics Marketing solution is installed in Dynamics CRM.

Check “Integration Services” for your Microsoft Dynamics Marketing

MDM connector can only be configured when Integration Services are enabled for your MDM environment. These services are only deployed in your MDM instance by Microsoft upon request.

1. To check whether the service is enabled or not, navigating to Settings -> Integration Options in MDM
2. The Status indicator at the top of the “Settings” page indicates the status of integration services for your MDM
   1. Blue checkmark indicates that integration services are enabled. 
   2. Red checkmark indicates that Integration Services are not been deployed yet for your MDM instance.

Note: Follow Appendix “How to configure Integration Services for Microsoft Dynamics Marketing for Office 365 admin portal” for steps to request Microsoft Support for the configuration.

Configure the MDM-CRM connector

1. To facilitate access to CRM from MDM via the Connector Service you must define a CRM Endpoint in MDM. The account you enter for the endpoint is used by the “Integration services” to create and change entities in the CRM system.
2. In MDM, navigate to Home -> Settings -> Integration Options to open the “Integration Settings” page.
3. In the “CRM Endpoint” section, click the Configuration button to open the “Configure CRM Account for Access by the Connector Service” dialog.                                                                   

Note: The “Configure CRM Account for Access by the Connector Service” is a model dialog and not supported by Chrome 37 and higher version. Tri using IE browser if configuration button does not respond on Chrome browser.

1. Provide the URL for your CRM Service and the credentials of your Connector account. You can click Verify to test that the credentials you have entered are valid. Click Submit to save and close.
2. Verify if MDM and CRM Listener services are enabled for your MDM instance on same settings page under Services Section.                                                                                                 
3. If these services are disabled, click on first highlighted arrow from left to enable MDM Listener, MDM Publisher and CRM Listener. The second arrow is to enable SDK Service.
4. On clicking Ok, the services will be enabled for configuration.                  
5. In the “Service Bus” section click the Configuration button to open the “Configure Windows Azure for Microsoft Dynamics Marketing” dialog.                                                                              

Note: Please see Appendix “Configure an Azure namespace to serve as the transportation channel” if you don’t have a preconfigured Azure namespace with ACS.

1. In the “Configure Windows Azure for Microsoft Dynamics Marketing” dialog
   1. Enter the service bus namespace in the “Azure Namespace field”
   2. Enter a name for the “Queue from Dynamics CRM”, eg “CRM2MDM”
   3. Enter a name for the “Queue from Dynamics Marketing “, eg “MDM2CRM”
   4. Click Configure Azure ACS to open the “Provide Credentials for configuring the Azure Service Bus” dialog.
   5. In the “Provide Credentials for configuring the Azure Service Bus” dialog you must provide a number of administrative credentials in order to setup the secured trust relationship between the integration service and your CRM system through your Azure service bus. None of these administrative credentials will be ever stored. They will be used for an automated configuration, which eases the configuration immensely.
   6. Type or paste the Azure Management key in the “Management Key” field.
   7. Enter the CRM Certificate issuer name in the “Dynamics CRM certificate issuer name” field. You can find the issuer name from your CRM Online system under Settings –> Customizations –>Developer Resources.                                                                                                        
   8. Download the certificate file from CRM (see screenshot above) and Upload the certificate file in the third field on the Azure service bus configuration dialog.
   9. Enter the credentials of an administrative account of your CRM system.
   10. Click OK to save and close the “Provide Credentials for configuring the Azure Service Bus” dialog and return to the “Configure Windows Azure for Microsoft Dynamics Marketing” dialog.
   11. Click Submit to save and close the “Configure Windows Azure for Microsoft Dynamics Marketing” dialog.
   12. Verify in the “Services” sections in the Integration settings page that you now have three service roles running:
       1. “MDM Listener” – listens for messages in the Azure Service Bus queue that indicate changes to make to data contained in Dynamics Marketing
       2. “MDM Publisher” – publishes messages to the Azure Service Bus queue to indicate changes that need to be made in Dynamics CRM
       3. “CRM Listener” – listens for messages that indicate a change needs to be processed in CRM. This role retrieves the messages from the Azure Service Bus queue and then executes a request against the CRM Organization Service to complete the change.         

1. The final step for your configuration is the initial synchronization. On the “Settings” page, scroll down to the “Initial Synchronization” section and click the arrow button and select Yes.                                                 
2. Wait until this step has completed.                                                                
3. You might need to refresh the “Settings” page a few times until the step is marked as complete.

Testing

1. Create a new Marketing Contact in MDM by navigating to Marketing Execution à Marketing Contact.
2. Save the contact and switch to CRM. Navigate to Sales à Contacts and search for the newly created record.
3. Update the email address field for the same contact in CRM and save.
4. Check the same contact in MDM for the change.                                                

Resources:

• http://blogs.technet.com/b/lystavlen/archive/2014/07/02/connecting-dynamics-marketing-to-dynamics-crm.aspx
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj863635.aspx
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&__sc_=12PXi&v=-LmHO8CMsGw&app=desktop
• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn781549.aspx
• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj993936(v=crm.6).aspx
• http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/install-configure-powershell/

 

Appendix: Configure an Azure namespace to serve as the transportation channel

Follow below steps for creating an Azure namespace with ACS on your existing Microsoft Azure subscription.

1. Open Microsoft Azure PowerShell. Download if not already installed.
2. Type > Add-AzureAccount to connect to your presubscribed Azure account.
3. Enter the email address and credentials for your Azure account and wait till the PowerShell connects.
4. Type > New-AzureSBNamespace
5. Upon prompt provide Namespce name and Type as below.                     
6. Use this namespace and Default Key for MDM configuration with Azure.

Appendix: How to configure Integration Services for Microsoft Dynamics Marketing for Office 365 admin portal

Follow below steps for requesting the Integration Services to be deployed for Microsoft Dynamics Marketing instance.

1. In the “Office 365 admin center” click Support in the left navigation panel and select Service Requests.
2. Click “+” to create a new Service Request (SR) with the following settings:
   1. Issue Type = “Technical Support”
   2. Service = “Dynamics Marketing”
   3. Service Area = “Connector”
   4. Problem area = “Connector Setup installation”
   5. Title = (type a title for your SR)
   6. Description = (include a description – good idea to include the URL of your MDM instance)
   7. Contact Name
   8. Contact Phone Number
3. A member of the support team might call you to verify the request details. As soon as the connector service has been deployed, you will see the blue checkmark.

Overview of Microsoft Dynamics Marketing (MDM)

abhijitdesaiblog about Microsoft Dynamics Marketing

Whether you’re a corporate marketing team or an advertising agency, Microsoft Dynamics Marketing delivers powerful, integrated marketing management solutions that can help you better understand your customers. With Microsoft Dynamics Marketing you’ll get exceptional insight, control over budgets and resources, and be able to create automated, measurable multi-channel campaigns to deliver tangible results.

Features

• Campaign management
• Brand management
• Lead management and scoring
• Social marketing
• Marketing analytics
• Reports and personal dashboards

Functional Areas

• Projects

In projects, these are your day-to-day activities, so these are things such as I have to create a brochure. I want to add a time slip. That’s what you’ll find in the project area.

• Marketing Execution

In Marketing Execution, you’ll find the things where you’re going to interact with customers and prospects, so perhaps you’re making an interactive campaign. You’re sending an email marketing message.

• Assets and Media

In Assets and Media, this is where…

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Languages in Microsoft Dynamics Marketing

There are currently ten languages available for Microsoft Dynamics Marketing.

They are:

1. English
2. Danish
3. Dutch
4. Finnish
5. French
6. German
7. Italian
8. Portuguese
9. Spanish
10. Swedish

One can also import various languages in Microsoft Dynamics Marketing. To import a language, you can click the import button, and then browse to the import file and finally click import. The language will start to come in.

One can also take the languages and export by clicking export. You can also reset any customization you made in any language by clicking the reset customization box.

Contact Import in Microsoft Dynamics Marketing

Import process in Microsoft Dynamics Marketing is bit modified as compared to Dynamics CRM. In this post we will try to cover the few points about the import followed by a VLOG showing step by step import process. In our case, we will discuss the Contact import process.

** Please note **

• You cannot update existing records by using the import process.
• Records that are already present in MarketingPilot will not be imported.
• Import process will vary from record type to record type.
• In order for the import to successfully map to a category field, the data in the source file must be identical to the value in MDM.

First step when performing the import is to select the type of contact that you are importing and the company the contacts will belong to.

The source file columns (left side) are mapped to the Microsoft Dynamics Marketing fields (right side).

Below is VLOG that explains step by step process to import Contacts in Microsoft Dynamics Marketing.

Configuring Microsoft Dynamics Marketing

Just received trial version for Microsoft Dynamics Marketing to perform hands on. But there is a minor configuration step that one need to complete for a site before using MDM. So here I am, coming up with few things for first time:
1. First time hands on MDM
2. First time VLOG (Video Blog)

I’m planing to convert/add vlog for all my existing blogs too.