The official update notes from Microsoft can be found here.
I'm trying to discuss the most important new or updated features and give some tips, how they could improve your daily work. It's only a first look and a small evaluation, not a deeper analysis. My ratings are also completely subjective and not meant to criticize Microsoft's product policy in any way.
General availability
Enhance email engagement by allowing browser viewing
The View in browser link for Real-time - it has finally arrived.
I requested this feature since Real-time was released years ago. Enable it in Feature Switches and add it to all of your Real-time emails through the simple link drop-down. Trust me: Your email recipients will really appreciate it.
Rating: Awesome - An absolute must have!
Improve appeal and match brand identity with custom fonts
It's now possible to better comply with company brand guidelines in emails by using custom fonts. You can do that by adding a new font in the email Theme section.
Sounds like a really good idea to use your company fonts, right? Well ... personally I wouldn't recommend to do that. The reason is, that an huge amount of email clients do NOT support custom fonts and will show a fallback version like Arial instead. The following table displays a brief overview which clients are supporting custom fonts and besides the Apple prodcuts no one does:
Rating: Experiment with it, if most of your email recipients are IPhone or Mac users. All others should stick to the standard fonts like Arial or Verdana which are 100% web safe.
Quiet times for communication channels
An interesting new feature to have more control over your message delivery and exclude specific timetables like weekends.
Even better are the Quiet dates! This opens up the opportunity to add all public holidays at the beginning of the year at once.
Rating: Great feature!
Personalize customer experiences using calculated metrics from Customer Insights - Data
An interesting new feature to use the calculated measures in our Journeys.
The first projects with a combination of Data and Journeys are on the way and maybe profit from this enhancement.
Rating: Good - But needs to be tested.
Public preview
Capture responses from external, third-party forms (better known as Form Capture)
Form Capture is now available in Real-time, so you can transfer more of your forms to the new environment. It seems, that the handling is more complex than expected and divers completely from the Outbound solution. Need to test it on a couple of forms to see the process and how long it will take to set up a capture.
Rating: Requested feature - But more complicated to use than the Outbound version.
Easily reference copies of sent emails in interaction timeline
Extremely useful for all users without access to the Customer Insight - Journeys ('Marketing') app. They are now able to see exactly the email which was sent to the Contacts/Leads they are working with. No more workarounds with sharing view in browser links and screenshots from delivered emails by the Marketing department.
Rating: Yes! Inform your Sales department immediately.
Monthly enhancements
Remove email addresses from suppression list (preview)
Provides us with more easy to access information about the person's email address status. This tab will be added automatically to the standard forms if you activate it in the feature switches. For default forms you need a workaround with the XML toolbox to add it (I provide a guide here in the next weeks). I really like the option to remove email addresses from the suppression list on my own, if I know exactly that this address is valid. No need to ask the support anymore.
Rating: Super helpful and more control for the users
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