In August, Unica released its newest version of their product suite (v8). From a user interface and platform integration perspective, this is the largest advancement in quite some time. This newsletter focuses on explaining the changes made in this release and offers product highlights to help you start assessing: What’s in it for U?

As a Unica Partner, AmberLeaf resources were involved with multiple v8 functional and technical training sessions. We’ve also started assisting some of our clients with both new installations and upgrades to v8. Here is a list of noteworthy changes and improvements from our experience so far:

1. New Unica brand. The 'fluffy' stuff has changed. They’ve introduced a new company brand including logo, slogan, product names and more. You’ll see the U from Unica used in many different callouts.
Our assessment: It’s a big improvement.

2. New user interface. Beyond the new logo, fonts and colors, version 8 now offers an integrated user interface and new navigation. The navigation panels have moved to the top of the screen and menus have changed to reduce the number of clicks when working through the full campaign management lifecycle. If you currently have multiple products installed, you’ll notice a big difference in usability here.
Our assessment: It is no iPhone, but a pretty big improvement in the user experience.

3. Single underlying platform. A single install utility (almost). Need we say more? Unica has put a lot of emphasis on making the install and upgrade process much easier in this version. For those of us that have been performing installs and upgrades for the last few versions, this is a welcome enhancement. The centralized approach will also help with ongoing maintenance and will make it easier to add-on new products later.
Our assessment: This is a very positive enhancement. We’ll go into detail on this topic in our next newsletter. Want more info now? Contact tperry@amberleaf.net.

4. Integrated dashboarding and interaction capabilities. Version 8 now offers a more contemporary homepage in that you can build quick reference dashboards that enable you to include any portlet from Cognos, Insight, NetInsight or other external application and websites.
Our assessment: Nice touch. This should start to get more marketing managers adopting the application and helps power users get the quick glance reporting they need.

5. Same powerful campaign engine. Once you get passed the new user interface and dashboards and get into the flowchart daily grind, you’ll notice that things have been left virtually unchanged. Some of our clients prefer this since this is where they spend ALL of their time and they are already comfortable with its capabilities. Others were hoping for more user experience and interaction improvement to help reduce the amount of time it takes to drag, drop and configure the common campaign.
Our assessment: Fence sitting. This is a major benefit but a flowchart overhaul is much anticipated. The flowchart is still powerful and stable.

6. Hosted email solution. Did your organization assess eMessage in the past and decide to not buy it? Well, now is the time to look again. Unica is now offering an integrated email capability that is hosted by them (though the response server is still on-premise). This means they will take care of the CAN SPAM rules, volume monitoring, etc. and you can focus on the execution, creative and post campaign analysis. One cool feature is the ability to preview what your email will look like across the top providers such as aol, yahoo, lotus and more. You no longer need to have test accounts setup with each, you can simply preview within eMessage to verify.
Our Assessment: This puts Unica on par with the rest of the Email Service Provider marketplace. It seems that many organizations jump from ESP to ESP based on price. For those that have Campaign, Unica is a preferable option due to the integration and could be the right stop on your next switch. Unica is eager to break into this marketplace and costs are very competitive.

7. Increased integration between Plan and Campaign. These are no long two separate products. Plan and Campaign have been combined into a more seamless planning and execution environment. This gives marketing managers an easier way to assist in the planning, cell count evaluation and offer assignment process. You can even add campaign extended attributes through Plan now.
Our assessment: If you are using both Plan and Campaign today, an upgrade is beneficial. Considering to add-on Plan? Now would be the time; go with version 8.

8. A Rose by Any Other Name. In conjunction with Unica’s Brand update, there have been several minor product name changes. For those of you in a support role for existing products, unless you know these new names you might find it hard to find documentation and other information on Unica’s customer support site since they’ve already changed the names there. Here is a quick reference guide to the new names (biggest changes listed first).

Curious about some other aspect of version 8’s functionality? Feel free to contact Tim Perry at 312.593.8404 or tperry@amberleaf.net for more information. Don’t hesitate to contact Tim to discuss a quick, free, assessment of your upgrade benefits.