Oracle Eloqua 18C Release Overview

Recent Eloqua releases have marked a welcome change after several years of minor updates. Last autumn marked the release of the new Oracle BI based Insight reporting module. A new responsive email design editor arrived in the Winter release. This week's release marks the start of controlled availability for the new landing page design editor. The general availability of this feature is expected to be in 2019, but it fills a significant gap in Eloqua's capabilities. Until now the only way to build a responsive landing page has been in HTML.

For many years, Eloqua customers have ignored the WYSIWYG editor because it doesn't support basic functionality such as responsive design, while simultaneously being too inflexible for power users and too easy to break for less sophisticated users. The design editor is far from perfect, but it significantly improves the power and flexibility available to Eloqua users that don't have development skills whilst being easier to use than previous Eloqua editors.

This release also adds custom CSS support to the email design editor allowing more complex use cases for the new editor. The landing page beta goes beyond this, and will include additional features such as video backgrounds and image carousels beyond those available for emails.

Analytics Enhancements

The other big new feature of recent years receives a few updates too. Oracle are adding a website performance dashboard to the increasingly sophisticated built-in dashboards. This won't replace a proper website analytics tool but opens up a summary of website source and trend data to all Eloqua users. Extra links are being added between the dashboards and insight to allow drill down from the dashboards, something which is very limited currently.

Insight adds essential new functionality ahead of the planned decommissioning of the legacy Classic Insight reporting module next month. When running reports in Classic Insight, relative date ranges such as the last 7 days or last 30 days were the preferred way of filtering activities to specific timescales. However, this feature has been notably absent from the new Insight module. This is being rectified starting with email reports.

Most surprinsing is a licensing update that applies from this release. Oracle are raising the limit on the number of Analyzer licenses that customers can have. This is the special license required to create custom reports in Insight's OBIEE engine. There has always been a limit on the number of Analyzer licenses available for customers ever since the initial release of Classic Insight. This is now being removed – customers can have Analyzer licenses allocated to all of their licensed marketing users if they so wish. All they need to do is raise a support case with Oracle.

Usability Enhancements

There are some small user interface enhancements in this release that have the potential to make Eloqua user's lives much easier. Perhaps the biggest is the ability to add notes to both campaigns and programs. This includes functionality to add notes to each program or campaign, but also to individual steps within them. This allows instructions and descriptions to be added to individual campaign steps indicating what needs to be configured in that step. This could make life much easier for less confident users by allowing power users to leave basic procedures in campaign canvases listing required actions for when they come to edit them. There is already a description field for both campaigns and programs so the general notes are less important, but will still be useful.

Drag and drop reordering of segment components is a long overdue update in this release. Segments are one of the major ways of creating and reviewing database counts in Eloqua, and the inability to change the order of individual filters in the segment is a frustration when editing them. This should allow the numbers in reporting segments to be much clearer to business users.

Custom Object Programs become useful with the addition of listener steps for new custom object records. Previously, custom object programs were of limited use, because the only way to add a custom object record to a program was by adding them from another contact level program. This enhancement opens up the possibility of custom object programs replacing the legacy custom object services functionality for automating actions following updates to CDO records.

There are also some enhancements to the UI for processing step conditions on forms to make reviewing and deleting conditions easier. It will be possible to view conditions on hover after this release, which while small will make QA of forms much faster.

Admin Enhancements

Eloqua has had user auditing features since the earliest days of the platform. However, these have been confined to a legacy UI resulting in incomplete information and frequent errors or usability issues. February saw the beta release of a new audit log covering a wide range of actions but especially changes to users & security, data uploads and data exports. This has now reached GA, so is being rolled out to all customers. This is a critical feature from a GDPR compliance perspective, because the old auditing features are a major benefit when troubleshooting user and data issues. A more modern version of the log to replace the legacy log is highly welcome.

New Sales Tools

However, from a broader Industry perspective the most significant updates in this release are to the Eloqua Sales Tools. Following their announcement at Modern CX in the spring, add-ons to Profiler are now in Controlled Availability. These display as additional tabs in the Profiler UI, regardless of whether it is used in a CRM system, on the web or within Eloqua itself. First out of the gate is LinkedIn Sales Navigator, but Profiler integrations are coming from a number of MarTech vendors including PathFactory, Demandbase and 6sense. Ask Oracle Support for access if you'd like to join the pilot.

The bigger announcement though is the release of the Eloqua Sales Tool plugin for Microsoft Outlook. This will bring both Profiler and Engage directly into most sales teams preferred email client. This comes 5 years after a previous Eloqua product management team scrapped the legacy ELMO plugin upon the initial release of the Engage sales email app. Unlike ELMO, this will be exactly the same app that Sales will already be (not) using in the CRM system or on mobile. Having it in Outlook will significantly increase adoption.

The Oracle Eloqua 18C Update is scheduled for August 17th, 2018. Contents of the release are subject to change. Full details, including smaller changes not mentionned in this article, can be found in the official release notes.