Updating from an earlier version

Article
05/15/2018
6 minutes to read

Applies To: Dynamics Marketing

Important

Microsoft Dynamics Marketing has been discontinued and is no longer available. All customer data related to this product has been permanently deleted from all Microsoft servers and is no longer available for extraction. This documentation is being provided for historical purposes only.

If you are updating from a previous version of Microsoft Dynamics Marketing, read this topic to find out what to expect and what to look out for. We have designed the update process to be as quick, easy, and trouble-free as possible, but you should still be aware of the process and some possible issues.

Update process overview

When your Dynamics Marketing instance is ready to be updated, your site administrator will receive an email from Microsoft Support asking how soon the update should be applied, together with a suggested date. Your administrator will be able to delay the update, but eventually it will be required. For complete details about the update process and how to schedule it, see Manage Dynamics Marketing updates.

Version-specific instructions

The table below summarizes the actions that you must take when updating from Microsoft Dynamics Marketing 2016 Update 0.8 to Update 0.9, and also notes some of the common update actions that are not required for this update.

Component	Asset to update	Relevant Environments	Update Needed	Notes
Microsoft Dynamics Marketing Connector for Microsoft Dynamics 365	Connector Dynamics 365 solution	Microsoft Dynamics 365 (online) Dynamics 365 (on-premises).	No	Not changed since the last update.
Microsoft Dynamics Marketing Connector for Microsoft Dynamics 365	Connector Windows service	Dynamics 365 (on-premises)	Optional	We recommend updating the on-premises connector binaries to take advantage of fixes and performance improvements.
Seller portal	Seller portal Dynamics 365 solution	Microsoft Dynamics 365 (online) Dynamics 365 (on-premises).	No	After updating, you must reset the seller portal in Dynamics Marketing by disabling and re-enabling it in the Site Settings. More information:Configure site settings
SDK	SDK clients Dynamics Marketing configuration	Dynamics Marketing	Optional	Consider moving to the new SAS authentication scheme, which can significantly improve performance when authenticating with the Azure Service Bus. More information:Configure the SDK and Dynamics 365 Connector
UI text	Base language files (non-English only)	Dynamics Marketing	Yes	After each update, download and import the new version of all non-English UI languages that you have installed. The updated language files are required because they contain labels and other text required by the new features. New English text is automatically included in the update. You only need to install the base layer for each language, so your UI text customizations will be preserved. For more information about downloading and importing languages, see Manage site languages.

General guidelines

This section summarizes many of the issues that may occur after you update to a new version of Dynamics Marketing. See the previous section for specific advice for your new version, but also consider the issues described here each time you update.

Update your Dynamics 365 connector

If you are integrating your Dynamics Marketing instance with Microsoft Dynamics 365, you should check your Microsoft Dynamics Marketing Connector for Microsoft Dynamics 365 version and update it if necessary. You should also consider installing the seller portal solution introduced for the last update, if you have not already. For details about these issues and links to relevant documentation, see Dynamics Marketing for Dynamics 365 users.

Re-import language files

After each update, download and import the new version of all non-English UI languages that you have installed. The updated language files are required because they contain labels and other text required by the new features. New English text is automatically included in the update. You only need to install the base layer for each language, so your UI text customizations will be preserved. For more information about downloading and importing languages, see Manage site languages.

Some workbooks that use OData feeds may need to be updated

A small number of columns from the OData feeds have different names for this release. This is to make them easier to understand going forward. However, this change may affect existing workbooks that use the previous feed names. If, when opening an existing workbook, you get an error message that says something like “Expression.Error: The column ‘LeadCount’ of the table was not found”, select the Go To Error button provided with the error message. This will bring you straight to the source of the problem, which will be a query referencing a column that no longer exists. Edit the query as needed using the new column names presented by the editor and save your workbook, which should now work as expected.

Audit your user roles

The update introduces new privileges and roles. You should inspect and update all user roles and accounts as needed after the update. Be aware of the following:

The update includes many new features and also introduces new user privileges for controlling access to them; add these new privileges to your roles and user accounts as needed.
The default, out-of-the-box user roles have been updated to include the relevant privileges for newly added features.
If you have edited any of the out-of-the-box user roles, your edits may have been overwritten during the update. Check them to be sure they still match your needs. To help prevent these types of problems, we recommend that you work on copies of the out-of-box roles if you wish to customize them.

More information:Create a role and assign user privileges to it

Update your Azure configuration

Dynamics Marketing now provides managed queues for Dynamics 365 (online) integration, so you no longer need to have a Microsoft Azure account and service bus namespace to integrate with Dynamics 365 (online). Also, you can now configure the Dynamics Marketing SDK and the Microsoft Dynamics Marketing Connector for Microsoft Dynamics 365 with different service bus namespaces.

If you’re integrating Dynamics Marketing with Dynamics 365 (online), we recommend switching to the managed queues right away. The system is designed to implement the switchover smoothly without losing any data. More information:Configure the SDK and Dynamics 365 Connector

Updating from legacy MarketingPilot

If you are updating from a legacy, MarketingPilot-branded version of Dynamics Marketing, you need to inspect the language culture names in use on your site before you update to make sure they conform to the following rules:

All language culture names used in your MarketingPilot configuration must be valid and included in this table: Table of Language Culture Names, Codes, and ISO Values Method [C++]
Your MarketingPilot configuration must not include more than one language per culture.

Inspect your MarketingPilot configuration to be sure that all of your language settings conform with the above rules and make whatever changes are necessary to ensure that each language culture is valid and unique.

Warning

If you attempt to update a MarketingPilot instance that does not conform to the preceding rules, you will be unable to sign into the updated Dynamics Marketing instance; you must contact Microsoft Support to resolve this issue.

After you update to the latest version of Dynamics Marketing, go to Settings > Administration > Languages and make sure that only valid languages are listed there.

For more information about working with languages in Dynamics Marketing, see Manage site languages. See also your MarketingPilot documentation.

This issue does not affect users updating from more recent versions of Dynamics Marketing.