New features and changes in version 12.1

Upgrade Paths

Fast Upgrade

Unica Campaign 12.1 supports the fast upgrade approach. This approach allows upgrades from version 8.6 onwards to version 12.1. This helps customers bypassing the multi-step upgrade. The Fast Upgrade approach is also useful in reducing upgrade downtime. The approach is provided for Unica Platform, Campaign, Optimize, Plan, Interact for upgrade from 8.6.x version onwards. For details, see the Fast Upgrade documentation released with version 12.1.

Campaign Integration with Journey

In V12.1 Unica introduced a new product – Journey - which helps marketer to establish a continuous communication with users based on user’s responses. Journey is more focused towards establishing a continuous dialog with user across multiple channels like Email, SMS and CRM.

Campaign has rich segmentation capabilities. For an enterprise organizations Campaign helps to perform segmentation of a huge customer base and identify segments of customer who can be targeted for marketing. Campaign segments / audience information could be pushed to Journey and Journey can help in continuous dialog with user. In Campaign flowchart a new process box is provided publish the audience information to Journey. This audience information will be sent via kafka instance being used by Journey application.

Please refer to Campaign Administration guide for more details.

Campaign Integration with Deliver

In V12.1 of Unica suite we have introduced Unica Deliver – EMAIL and SMS delivery solution which is tightly integrated with Unica Campaign. This has empowered Unica Campaign to run Campaign email and SMS execution seamlessly with Unica Deliver. For email deliveries Unica Deliver captures the offers contacts and responses and made them available in Campaign for drip marketing.

Unica Deliver and Campaign integration now enables marketer to:

• Conduct a targeted, measurable Email Marketing Campaign .
• Define and create lists of email recipients using Deliver process box in Campaign.
• Interface that allows you to edit and personalize the email you want to send emails.
• Configure, execute, and monitor Deliver mailings using a mailing tab provided in the Campaign interface.
• Send personalized email messages to a list of selected individuals.
• Tracking responses.
• Create mailboxes to accommodate responses by email.

A new process box with name “Deliver” will be available in Campaign flowchart which can be used to send communications via deliver.

Please refer to Unica Deliver documentation for more details.

Campaign with Link Integration

In V12.1 Unica introduced a new product component in Unica suite called as “Unica Link”. Unica Link has extended capability of Campaign to be flexible enough to connect with any delivery channel via REST capabilities.

Along with V12.1 - Unica Link will be providing reference connectors for below delivery channels:

• Salesforce(CRM)
• MailChimp and Mandrill(email)
• Twilio(SMS) 

Unica Link provides a connector framework to build any type of connector based on REST. These capabilities can be leveraged with HCL services help in V12.1.

In Campaign application a new process box – Link is introduced. This process box will allow user to create connections to the underlying connections.

Link process box in Campaign generates an output data in flat file and shares that data with Unica Link application on a shared drive. Unica link will also capture the responses and generate the results in flat file on the same shared drive.

Unica Insights - Reporting Tool Support for MariaDB

Unica V12.1 reporting tool is rebranded with name as Unica Insight. It still operates based on BIRT reporting tool. In V12.1 reporting is extended to support MariaDB system tables.

• Unica Insights – reporting based on BIRT reporting tool.
• Campaign – out of the box reports available for MariaDB system tables using Unica Insights.
• Unica Insights tool would be default bundled and available with Unica Marketing Platform.
• Campaign provides all out the box support with Unica Insights system databases such as SQL, ORA, DB2 & MariaDB.

Please refer to Unica Insights Reporting documentation for more details.

Campaign Licensing

Starting from V12.1 Unica product suites are license enabled. Unica products will need appropriate licenses to for production use. Other than production environments do not require to have the licenses. Each product in Unica suite license type is different. Please refer to HCL Unica Suite Licensing guide.

License definition for Unica Campaign:

• Based on numbers of marketing records processed in Campaign/Optimize.
• Track the count of the audience (lead/contact) to whom you will send the communication or any other marketing message.
• In simple words, the number of audiences who are being processed by Unica Campaign.
• Shows the consumption count of these audiences processed from Unica Campaign.
• Provides term and perpetual licenses for Campaign.

Optimize Licensing

Optimize license is based on license key – you can contact to Unica Sales / Support team to get the license for optimize. Optimize licenses are required to be applied on production and non-production environments. Please follow below steps to get the Optimize license:

1. You will need to provide the hostname of the machine where you are running Campaign listener to execute optimize sessions.
2. Once you provide this hostname support team would be providing you the license file.
3. Copy the license file in Campaign/conf directory.

Addition in Campaign REST APIs

A new API is made available to get the list of table catalog in the mentioned API. This will help marketer to details of mapped tables in the loaded table catalog and use this information while designing the process box expression.

Under Campaign flowchart APIs are provided for Snapshot process box configuration. User can configure the snapshot process box with below configurations:

1. Output to flat file (this does not include output to file with existing data dictionary).
2. Output to database table (base/dimension/general).
3. Output to database table with append or replace operations.
4. Map the output fields in the snapshot process box.
5. Using derived fields in output via APIs is not yet supported.

Campaign Listener Clustering Supports UNC Path for Cluster Share on Windows

Campaign listener clustering on windows now support the cluster share path in below format.

You can use this path under configuration parameter: Settings for 'campaignClustering' (Affinium|Campaign|campaignClustering)

CampaignSharedHome = \\zebra39.hclpnp.com\CampaignClusterShare\partition1

Add token <KEYCOLUMNS> only for Audience ID and < TABLECOLUMNS > for table field

In earlier Campaign versions under datasource configruation – for 'TempTablePostExecutionSQL' while creating unique Index only Audience ID was considered. In V12.1 we have introduced a new token <TABLECOLUMNS> along with <KEYCOLUMNS> token. So, if you provide <KEYCOLUMNS> token in Unique Index creation query then only Audience ID will be considered and if you provide <TABLECOLUMNS> all other fields other than Audience ID will be considered. In case user wants all the fields to be considered then new query would be for 'TempTablePostExecutionSQL' CREATE unique INDEX <TABLENAME>_IX1 ON <TABLENAME> (<KEYCOLUMNS> <TABLECOLUMNS>)