March 2021 - Version 3.19

THE EVENT WIZARD IS HERE!

It's finally here! After months of work, we have officially released our first version of the Events Wizard. This wizard was created because the most popular feedback that we received was, "it's hard to create events in Salesforce."

Keep in mind that every first version needs a bit of refinement. We currently have 4 development tickets opened to fix a few things with the wizard. Please reach out to our support team if you find any bugs or want to provide feedback. This only gets better with more people using it.

A close second to the Event Wizard is our Enhanced Email integration. Now you can create beautiful emails and send them with a service outside of Salesforce. Why is this important?

1. For Admins, you won't run into your 24-hour email limit (our email template builder uses Apex to send the emails).
2. For Admins and Event Managers, significantly fewer emails will hit spam folders.
3. For Event Managers, you will be able to create your own email template, send the email through our integration, and receive metrics about your email. IE., opens, bounces, and clicks without having to solely use Pardot, Marketing Cloud, Mailchimp, etc...

Our enhanced email feature will be free until September 1st, 2021 for all current customers. After September 1st, pricing will be based on monthly email usage.

Please watch the two-minute video below. Our CEO, Chris Federspiel goes through a quick demo.

Quick Note For All

We are structuring our release notes a little differently from here on out. Under each feature and enhancement, you'll see:

ADMINS
EVENT MANAGERS

We received feedback from several customers asking for a release note that wasn't all for Salesforce Admins. To explain in non-admin talk what these new features and enhancements can do for event managers and end-users. Again, we heard and changed up our process.

If you have any questions about the release note, please don't hesitate to reach out to Blackthorn Support

A few items to mention: Please Read

• There are a few breaking changes with this release, please read the note below, so your events aren't affected.
• If possible, please upgrade in a Sandbox before upgrading Production.
• If you are skipping prior releases to the current version, read prior release notes as there are specific upgrade steps that need to be performed. They can be found on the left-hand side, under the "Release Notes and Webinar Recordings" section.

Breaking Changes

A breaking change is an update that Blackthorn makes that could impact your process.

1. Any Data Dictionary entry that uses "LBL_" will now respect capitalization that is entered in the Data Dictionary value field.For example, if you have LBL_date = ExAMpLe, it is currently showing up on the front end as "Example." When the attendee experience/front-end update happens, it will update to: "ExAMpLe."
2. The default event group feature allowed you to embed a default Event Group onto your website or community and any event created would automatically be added to the group. On March 16th, you'll need to set the Event Group lookup field on the Event record for the event to show up in the list or calendar view.

Features

Back End Features

A back-end feature is something that you can test immediately after upgrading your Salesforce org to the latest Blackthorn Events package.

• Event Wizard
  As mentioned in the video above, we are super excited to be rolling this feature out. Our goal is to radically improve the process of creating events in Salesforce.

• Blackthorn Enhanced Emails
  We have integrated with SendGrid, an email delivery service, to provide you with another way to send event emails from Salesforce. Using the Blackthorn Enhanced Email service, you can: create an email right from the Event record, send it out through the SendGrid integration (no more Salesforce limitations!), and receive email metrics about how the delivery went.

Front End Feature

A front-end feature is something that you can test with the test link below, but will not be live with your event URL until Blackthorn pushes out the front-end release.

• Session Carousel!

We have improved our Sessions feature by adding a featured session carousel! The featured sessions will scroll through the banner at the top of the page every 10 seconds.

Enhancements

Front End Enhancements

A front-end feature is something that you can test with the test link below, but will not be live with your event URL until Blackthorn pushes out the front-end release.

• Any Data Dictionary entry that uses blank spaces to hide text will now have a transparent background. Before when you removed the text, it was still showing a shadow on the page where the text would have been.
• The ability to add a session to your calendar through an AttendeeLink.
• When completing a Post Event Survey, the success message has been changed from "Thank you for helping us improve our product!" to "Thank you!"
• You can now enable a setting to hide events that have reached capacity from an Event Group page, automatically. Read here on step 6, to find out more.

Back End Enhancements

A back-end enhancement is something that you can test immediately after upgrading your Salesforce org to the latest Blackthorn Events package.

• Email Templates can now be saved and used across all events instead of one specific event!

Mobile Check-In app

• The Mobile Check-In app has been through a bug overhaul. Previously the app had a lot of UI bugs on iOS that made it unusable.
• The ticket icon on the Mobile Check-In app has been updated. Now the ticket icon has been removed and there will be a Register button at the top of the page, as well as on the bottom.

Bug Fixes (For Admins)

Front End Bug Fixes

A front-end bug fix is something that you can test with the test link below, but will not be live with your event URL until Blackthorn pushes out the front-end release.

• Fixed: If you were only using UTM Parameters as custom questions, the form submission record wouldn't show the UTM parameter values.
• Fixed: [Event Keywords] will no longer be auto-capitalized and will respect the capitalization entered in Salesforce.
• Fixed: When an event does not have an Event Group associated with it, the "Back Arrow" in the top left corner of the page will no longer be displayed.
• Adjusted our image responsiveness. When uploading images that do not meet aspect ratios, they will now be distorted instead of cut off around the edges.
• Fixed: The pricing label will now appear as Pricing on the event registration page.
• Fixed: When adding an image to the Event description field, if there was a space in the image name, previously it would cause an HTML error.
• Fixed: Changed Deutsche to Deutsch in the language dropdown selector as a part of Data Dictionary / Translations.
• Fixed: When an event does not have a start or end date using the Oak UI, the calendar icon will now be hidden. Previously this left a calendar icon visible with no date labeled inside.
• Fixed: When an event does not have a start or end time using the Ash UI, there will no longer be a grey dot visible where the event times would have been located.

Back End Bug Fixes

A back-end bug fix is something that you can test immediately after upgrading your Salesforce org to the latest Blackthorn Events package.

• Fixed: When deleting conditional questions, there was a bug that would delete multiple parent questions as well. This should no longer occur.
• Fixed: When an event has an apostrophe in its name, the related Sales Document was inserting a backslash.
• Fixed: When the same contact/account/lead registers for an event more than once, the Duplicate Rule field will now populate correctly.
• Fixed: When using the Email Template Builder and opening then saving it several times, it would result in a spacing issue when sending out the email.
• Fixed: When using the Email Template Builder and injecting merge fields, this was double-injecting the Blackthorn namespace.
• Fixed: When using the Attendee Registration Lightning Component there was an error when registering a new Person Account (someone who is not already in your Salesforce Org) as an Attendee.
• Fixed: In the Event Reminder email template, there was a typo in the plain text version.
• Fixed: When an attendee with an Invited status received their AttendeeLink and joined the waitlist for an event, it would create a duplicate attendee. This will now link to the existing attendee and update the registration status to Waitlist - Pending.

New Fields/Layouts

We recommend manually adding these fields to their respective object page layout.

• Update the Filter Fields field on the Event Group to Category, Keywords, and No Filters.
  • The following fields will no longer have support: Date, Distance, and Time (please remove).