July 19, 2023
New
Before diving into the details of this month’s release notes, we are excited to announce the launch of our Ad Orbit re-branding, and the celebration of our 10-year anniversary! Over the next few weeks, you’ll see a few changes in your system (nothing functional), including the updating of colors, logos, and URLs. The platform will be the same service that you know and love, just an updated version. With this, we want to extend a huge thank you to you, our customers, for making this possible. We couldn’t do it without you!
We are in the initial phases of creating our SendMyAd integration. The SendMyAd platform is a portal advertisers can use to upload materials for upcoming issues. The integration allows you to use Ad Orbit’s sales and billing, while also taking advantage of SendMyAd’s preflighting features. In this release, we added the ability to set up the integration, and map your Publishers, Publications, Issues, Colors, and Ad Sizes between the two systems. Once connected, tickets for mapped items created in Ad Orbit will automatically be created within your SendMyAd account.
This release we also made it possible to pull in assets from SendMyAd. If a file is uploaded to a mapped item in SendMyAd, that asset will be brought into Ad Orbit and added to the corresponding ticket.
Currently, only print advertisements are supported, although we plan to expand the integration in future releases to include digital ads and digital media items.
There is a new Item Product Class option within Ad Orbit which is an optional classification of ad sizes and products. To set up Item Product Classes, you need the new user permission ‘Product Item Class’. With the permission, you can go to the Settings > Products > Item Product Classes page, where classes can be created and managed. On each class, you can choose the product type, and select specific ad sizes and products to include.
Classes will be displayed on reporting; specifically, the Consolidated Sales and Consolidated Snapshot reports.
Subscription-Based Service Products
Service products can now be set up as Subscription-Based, meaning you can have line items automatically recur based on duration periods that you define. The ability to set these duration periods is found within the ‘Subscription Information’ tab on the Service Product add/edit page and is only available after setting up a service product as subscription based.
You can set up multiple durations for each subscription-based product, and when adding the item to an order, you will specify which duration to use.
There’s also the option to choose whether to associate the product with a single contact for the company, or multiple. When adding the item to an order, you can tie the item to the company’s contact(s).
Improvements
Opportunity and Forecast Updates
In this release, we made a handful of updates to how our Opportunities and Forecasts look and function. The following are all of the changes made this month.
The add/edit opportunity popup is now an add/edit opportunity page.
Forecasts will now be grouped under their Opportunity, rather than being broken out into individual items upon creation.
The add/edit forecast popups have been updated so there are specific popups for ad forecasts, digital media forecasts, and service forecasts. Each type has different optional and required fields.
New actions were added to the table on the company’s Opportunities tab. When clicking the ellipsis icon on an Opportunity, you’ll now see additional actions to Add a Forecast for the opportunity and Update All Forecasts on the opportunity.
If you do not specify a price in the Add Forecast popup, and you choose either a digital media or service product, the price will get auto-filled based on the product’s default price. This can be overridden if needed.
There is now a popup shown when deleting opportunities or forecasts. The ‘provide lost sales reason’ system configuration setting will apply to what you see in this popup.
Map Your Show Integration Improvements
We have continued to improve on our Map Your Show integration. Below are the changes we made to the integration this release.
Products can now be ‘blacklisted’ from the Map Your Show import. When editing an event, in the Map Your Show section, you can now pick and choose which product types will be brought into Ad Orbit from MYS for that particular event. If you choose to exclude a MYS product type, then all associated line items, invoices, and payments for that product type will be ignored and not brought into Ad Orbit.
Installment schedules are now automatically created within Ad Orbit based on the Map Your Show payment schedule.
Invoice XREF and XREF Source fields have been added to the Invoice Fact and Analytics Invoices tables in the DataWarehouse. The MYS Order Number has also been added to the Orders Fact table and the Analytics Sales table. Both of these changes make it easier to track MYS orders, invoices, and payments within the DataWarehouse and Metabase.
Items can now manually be brought into the Lockbox on the Csv Upload lockbox tab.
Omeda Updates
In last month’s release we introduced a basic version of an Omeda integration. This release we made some improvements to it.
Omeda input IDs can now be added to Publications and Contact Lists. These IDs will show up as a display field on the Publication and Contact List search pages.
Individual subscriptions can now be marked as Ready for Export, either on the edit subscription page, or as an action from the Subscription Search page.
A Simple Digital Media export option has been added for digital publications.
Users can now choose how often files are exported via FTP to Omeda, and can choose from various frequencies including daily, weekly, and monthly.
Additional Improvements
You can now bulk update the Description field on digital media products.
Invoice and Payment information can now be exported using a Naviga export format.
The error file format for importers has been updated. Now, if running an import and you get errors, the error file will show each error on its own row.
Attainment levels can now be added directly to user records for specific years. This is applicable if you are using Commission Tiers. On the user record, you can ‘seed’ the attainment values for a year and specify which attainment type to use (invoices, contracts, or payments).
On the Billing tab for companies, Special Invoices will now include line item details when applicable, in the expanded invoice view.
The Product Categories page now shows 25 results per page by default, rather than 10.
A Payments table has been added to the Billing tab on companies. This brings the data from the old Payments tab into the new Billing tab. Payment information can also still be seen when expanding Invoice details.
The Consolidated Sales Report now includes a display field for Company Primary Rep, and a display field for Commission Information. There was also a Company Zip Code search field added this release.
Event names can now be dynamically generated within a Dynamic Attribute. What this means, is if you set up a Dynamic Attribute and enter ‘[Event_Name]’ in the Restricted Values field, the options for that attribute will be all active Events in your system.
A Ticket Dynamic Attribute search field has been added to the Invoice Register Report.
Product Categories are now shown in the Media Types table.
Ad Specs have been added to Slot digital media products.
A Researcher (Vendor Contact) search field has been added to the Project Request Details Report.
The Annual Issue Sales and Annual Sales by Month reports now take into account the issue close dates, when applicable. The Annual Sales by Month report also now allows you to group the report results by User, or by Product.
A Service Quantity display field has been added to both the Consolidated Sales Report, and the Consolidated Snapshot report. Additionally, a Service Note field was added to the Consolidated Snapshot report.
When the Project Request module is enabled, vendor contacts will no longer be required to attach a file when registering.
Fixes
Deleted line items are now appearing correctly on the Line Item Edits report.
A language change was made so the ‘Ready for Ad Network’ permission and button now reads ‘Ready for Ad Server’.
The ‘label’ limit when connecting to a Gmail account using the Nylas integration has been increased to 300.
The export from the Accounts w/o Activity Report will no longer include code in the file.
The Consolidated Snapshot Report now applies the Organization Filtering system configuration correctly.
If a Map Your Show company gets re-mapped using the Lockbox, the ‘altid’ for the company now gets reassigned.
Map Your Show orders are now showing up in the Sales Rep Activity Report.
The ‘show items with $0 gross’ setting on contract and invoice templates is now properly applying to digital media items.
Surcharge amounts will now properly be applied if a character other than a number is entered into the configuration. For example, previously ‘3%’ would not apply properly because it included a special character.
The Product Sales widget is now accurately calculating large values.
When adding a new Slot product, the first size will stay selected when adding multiple.
Deleting Media Type categories will no longer cause an error.
Slot items with negative net values were not saving correctly. This bug has been fixed.
The anonymous artwork upload link will no longer show as expired if the contact is logged into the Client Center.
A bug caused by the previous release has been resolved, so automated Ticket Assignments are working properly now, and any missed ticket assignments were updated.
A specific scenario was causing BCC email activities to create duplicated records. The bug has been fixed and the records corrected.
When importing subscriptions, the issue set on the file now has to match the publication.
A bug causing Mailchimp lists to fail pushing has been fixed. This applies to manually pushing lists as well as auto-pushing.
The Annual Client Spend Report now applies the State filter to the Forecast data, in addition to the Sales data.
Adding a new channel to a slot product that has been used on orders will no longer cause an error.
All .docx file types can now be uploaded onto tickets.
The Billing Report now shows Publications for digital media items, as well as service items when applicable.
A width display issue has been corrected on the popup for email activities from the Sales Rep Activity Report.
Digital media tickets that are grouped are now correctly being marked as done.
User publication restriction settings are now properly applying to digital media items.
The daily activity email is now formatting contact links correctly.