Oracle Eloqua 20B Release Overview

Time waits for no man, and neither does Oracle's release schedule. Even in the middle of a global pandemic, the Eloqua 20B release hits customer instances over the next two weeks, starting with PODs 1 and 2 this weekend. It's not a small release either, containing several significant upgrades to the design editors and asset management across emails, landing pages and forms. There's not a tremendous amount of depth to the release beyond the headline features, but the return of form archiving is applicable even to users who continue to use the HTML editors to create emails and landing pages.

Archiving

Archiving was widely used in Eloqua 9 but was dropped from Eloqua 10 when it was launched a decade ago. This was not the only feature that was lost during the transition from the old platform to the new, but it is probably the only one which is still missed by long-time Eloqua users. Now it is coming back, with Oracle announcing that it will find its way to the rest of the Eloqua platform over the next few quarters. To be fair, it has still lingered in some areas of the platform such as program builder that still use the old Eloqua 9 UI even after the transition to Eloqua 10.

For now, only forms can be archived. This hides them from the UI, even if searched for. Users can find archived assets if they really want to as there is a separate asset chooser for archived forms on the forms launchpad that supports search and has all the usual filters and views. Archived forms can still receive form submissions and can continue to be served to visitors on landing pages or website pages. Archiving doesn't impact reporting either, as archived assets still appear in most reports. It does prevent forms from being edited, copied or renaming which opens up an additional use case for archiving beyond that of cleaning up a busy instance with many old forms. The fact that archived forms continue to work, but can't be edited means that they can be used to hide important forms that shouldn't be touched even by admin users. Permissions can control access for standard users, but admins should always have full access to everything.

Block Library

The other major addition to the asset management experience only affects the design editors. It's a big one though, as it significantly enhances Eloqua's ability to create modular templates. The new design editors have always been modular, but the ability to copy and reuse modules has been constrained by the editor UI. Layouts in a template can be duplicated, but they can't re-added to a template once removed nor can they be shared across templates. The new content block library means that these two missing capabilities are now possible. Layouts created in one email or landing page can be converted into content blocks and added to the library for use in any other email or landing page. Each block can contain multiple orange-outlined layout sections, meaning that complex layouts such as a 3 column section with a header and a footer can be converted into a single block and shared across assets. It's even possible to create a content block that can be used by both emails and landing pages.

It's strongly recommended that the block library is only used for template modules, rather than for sharing specific content across emails. The UI for finding and adding content blocks to assets is only designed to handle a small block library. Oracle's recommendation is to keep the block library below 50 assets. In this respect, it does not replace Eloqua's shared content capability. Use it share specific combinations of blocks with custom styling that users can drop into their campaigns before inserting their content. In doing so, it ensures that marketers don't have to mess around with the occasionally fiddly task of adjusting column layouts in the editor while giving admins guarantees that all Eloqua emails will be built according to corporate templates and brand guidelines.

Design Editor Upgrades

To accompany the new block library, the options panel in both the email and landing page design editors has been given a refresh. The list of available content sections appears in a list view rather than as a grid. The landing page editor gains a new content type as well. There is a dedicated video option that makes it easier to embed YouTube and Vimeo videos into pages. It's always been possible to add videos using the embed or custom code options, but this makes it easier particularly when dealing with responsive videos that would otherwise need custom CSS to adjust the size of the content on different devices. YouTube video embeds are not natively responsive.

There is a new, and very important, feature for both asset design editors that similarly helps in making it easier to create truly responsive experiences. The inability to adjust the content of Eloqua email and landing pages when displayed on mobile has long limited the type of designs that it is possible to create in the editors. Banner images are a common feature that web design best practice suggests should be adjusted or removed for mobile screen resolutions, as are some types of decorative elements. Yet until now, Eloqua has not made it possible to hide specific pieces of email or landing page content on mobile. There is now a 'hide on desktop' and 'hide on mobile' option in the editor that is available in the content section settings for each cell added to an asset. For now, this is a controlled availability feature, but expect it to be released more broadly in the near future similar to how the previously restricted ability export the HTML of emails and landing pages created in the design editor has been made generally available in this release.

Finally, the new CRM Integration apps have both received major upgrades. The Oracle Sales Cloud app gains the ability to import Campaign Members from the CRM system into Eloqua. This is something many customers have long wanted, and I've replicated the same functionality using a custom object more than once. The Salesforce app regains the ability to change the email address of existing Eloqua contacts. This is a feature of the native integration that was lost on the transition to the new app. It works better on paper than in practice, because of Eloqua's requirement for email addresses to be unique. If the new email address is already linked to a different Eloqua contact, then the change of email address fails. Although it is a useful ability for the platform with many use cases.

The Oracle Eloqua 20B Update is scheduled over two weekends starting May 15th, 2020. Contents of the release are subject to change. Full details, including smaller changes not mentioned in this article such as changes to Insight, can be found in the official release notes.