July 8, 2025

What’s New in Anthology Reach? – July 2025

The July 2025 update to Anthology® Reach introduces a powerful slate of enhancements designed to deepen proactive student engagement, strengthen system integrations, and improve everyday efficiency for staff. Whether you’re building coordinated care strategies, sending timely nudges, or scheduling student meetings, this release brings new flexibility to help your team move faster and with more confidence.

Smarter Success Plans with Enrollment Context

Success planning just got a whole lot smarter. Previously, Success Plans in Reach were created at the student (Contact) level only, making it difficult to tailor interventions when students were enrolled in multiple academic programs.

Now, Success Plans can be created and assigned at the Enrollment level, giving advisors the clarity to align support plans with specific programs, cohorts, or academic contexts. This is especially useful for institutions supporting dual degrees or concurrent program paths.

You’ll notice:

• A new Enrollment field on the Success Plan page
• An Assign Success Plan option directly from the Enrollment record
• Enhanced controls on the Success Plan Assignment page, including the ability to define dynamic queries for enrollment-based assignments
• Removal of the Current Academic Period requirement, making bulk assignment more inclusive

Together, these changes make it easier to align student support with how students are actually moving through your institution.

More Reliable Outlook Busy Sync for Staff Calendars

Scheduling student appointments through Reach? You’ll be glad to know that Busy Sync with Outlook just got more accurate and reliable. This update ensures the Staff Calendar won’t mistakenly show availability when a staff member is already booked in Outlook, reducing double bookings, administrative cleanup, and missed connections.

Key benefits include:

• Real-time conflict detection
• Improved trust in calendar availability
• A smoother experience for both students and staff

Preview: SMS and WhatsApp Messaging via Twilio

Institutions looking for greater flexibility in student communications can now explore SMS and WhatsApp messaging via Twilio—available as a preview feature in this release.

With self-service configuration for your Twilio account, Reach users can send outbound SMS (and WhatsApp messages) to students as part of a multi-channel outreach strategy. While currently MVP-level with known limitations, this feature gives institutions more control and scalability as part of a phased rollout.

Reach + Blackboard = Unified Student Alerts

We’re thrilled to unveil a new Blackboard-to-Reach integration that brings course activity alerts into the hands of advisors and student success teams.

When a student triggers an alert in Blackboard®—due to a missed due date, low grade, or lack of engagement—that signal now appears directly in Anthology Reach as a Student Alert, enabling faster, more coordinated outreach across campus teams.

New alert reasons have also been added in Reach, including:

• LMS – Missed Due Date
• LMS – Grade Below Threshold
• LMS – Days Since Last Access

This is a big step toward closing the loop between faculty insights and student support interventions.

Microsoft Dynamics Wave Updates: What Advisors and Admissions Teams Should Know

Every six months, Microsoft releases Wave updates to Dynamics 365 and Power Platform. While these often include broad platform improvements, several updates in this Wave 1 cycle bring tangible benefits for frontline enrollment and advising teams. Here's what that means for you:

1. ✋ Respect Student Boundaries with Quiet Time Rules 

Admissions counselors and academic advisors know timing is everything—especially when reaching out to students across time zones or in sensitive moments. With the new Quiet Times feature in Real-Time Marketing, you can now configure communication windows based on:

• The student's preferred time zone
• Country- or state-level settings, mapped through contact address fields
• Message types (e.g., SMS vs. email)

This means your outreach efforts will automatically avoid late-night messages or early-morning disruptions, aligning with institutional policies and improving student trust and engagement. Quiet Times can be managed globally, or tailored to the specific journey and audience.

2. 🛑 Pause and Resume Journeys Mid-Flight 

Ever wanted to temporarily halt a marketing or advising journey without losing progress? Now you can. With Pause and Resume controls, staff can temporarily stop a live journey—for instance, during a system maintenance window or mid-cycle content revision—and then restart it once the timing is right. This provides the operational flexibility many teams have asked for without having to rebuild campaigns from scratch.

3. 🔥 Track What Works with Email Click Maps 

Now available: Email Heatmaps help your team quickly visualize which parts of your message are getting the most engagement. Whether you’re sending yield campaign emails or nudging students to schedule advising appointments, this feature provides:

• Click-through rates by section
• Filters by journey, audience, or date
• Device-specific analytics (mobile vs. desktop)

It’s a faster way to see what’s resonating without needing to export or analyze separate reports.

4. 🧭 Understand Journey Flow at Every Step 

For multi-touch communications like onboarding sequences or re-engagement efforts, it's now easier to monitor who enters and exits each step of the journey. This gives enrollment marketers and advising teams better visibility into:

• Where students drop off
• Which actions lead to successful progression
• When to intervene or iterate on message strategy

5. 🧰 New Automation Center for Power Automate

Many institutions use Power Automate to trigger communications, manage workflows, or update student records. The new Automation Center brings centralized visibility to all these flows, making it easier to troubleshoot issues, monitor performance, and even get AI-assisted guidance using Copilot.

Bookmark and reference when working with your IT or admin teams:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/release-plans/

Where to Find Release Notes

You can access the official release notes for each Anthology Reach update in two places:

• Anthology Community: Perfect for staying connected with other users and exploring exclusive related resources for Anthology customers
• Anthology support site: Great for bookmarking and referencing when working with your IT or admin teams

Stay informed and make the most of each release by checking both locations regularly.

Anthology Reach 2025.2 is designed to empower the people who make higher education thrive with smarter tools, actionable data, and greater control. This release brings powerful user-centric enhancements designed to deepen proactive student engagement, strengthen system integrations, and improve everyday efficiency for staff.

Explore these updates and more in the full Reach 2025.2 release notes.

Connect with Anthology today to learn more about how our solutions can help your institution improve the student experience and achieve operational excellence.