Author: Alex Rogora

This post is delivered by Alex Rogora, an Analyst and Cloud Administrator specialized on Marketing Cloud. Thanks to this multipurpose profile – a computer science background, university degree on Communication and several years of work experience in mail marketing – he is member of the Solution team for WebResults (Engineering Group), that studies new technologies released by Saleforce.

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The life of a Marketing Cloud consultant can be hard, especially when it comes to migrating configurations from one Business Unit to another.

Of course, some assets or Data Extensions can be shared between multiple BUs in the same environment, but if we talk for example about customer journeys, automations, or data model, the only solution was to replicate the configuration manually without any type of support.

This was true until few months ago, when the Deployment Manager made its quietly debut on the AppExchange.

As reported in the dedicated page, Deployment Manager is a Salesforce Labs app that “allows users to import/export Marketing Cloud campaign configuration”.

Easy, clear and even free: let the revolution begin!

WHAT CONFIGURATIONS ARE WE TALKING ABOUT?

The first features enabled in April 2019 were the canvas structure of customer journeys and in a short time  the export of Data Extension schemas were added as well.

To be honest, not every element that make up the journey is replicated at the moment: for example the entry source is missing and for some activities there is only the placeholder, but it’s a good place to start.

For Data Extensions, the snapshot is limited to the fields, while the contained records are not exported. But in my humble opinion I think this is right, because we have privacy constraints and often the data in a test BU is different from that used in production.

A few months later the Deployment Manager added a partial support for deploy automation and, in certain cases, also for the related activities contained.

For example, if the automation contains a query activity, the extracted JSON file will also contain the information to generate the activity itself and the corresponding destination DE. While, unfortunately, in the case of “send emails”, neither the related activity nor the associated creativity will be created, but we’ll only see the placeholder in the automation step. Fortunately, the import report is quite descriptive and allows you to obtain useful information on the individual elements copied.

Finally, the Deployment Manager supports the possibility to export attribute groups of the data model.

In this case the deployment process seems to be quite complete, because both the attribute sets and the necessary DE are automatically exported.

But this is only the beginning clearly.

With a look to the near future, hypothesis predict about content builder folder organization, asset and the completion of existing journey features.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

Well, it’s very simple.

Once installed through AppExchange in both BUs, the source and the destination one, Deployment Manager allows you to export the configurations you want to copy by creating a JSON file that can be easily downloaded.

This snapshot contains the metadata of the journey, DE, attribute group, or automation without any customer data or campaign data. The exported file can therefore be easily re-imported into the target business unit, even in different accounts.  

Wait, wait..wait!

Did you just say also in different accounts? Yes, even in BU belonging to different marketing cloud enterprises.

And want to know another amazing thing?

We can export / import multiple configurations at the same time, in the same snapshot, with few clicks!

So, even though there is still a bit of stuff to fix / add, it’s clear that this app allows all customers to decrease the effort needed for production deployment processes, while also minimizing the risk of error during this phase.

Deployment Manager is also a useful ally for Salesforce partners, because it allows you to easily recreate configurations previously implemented in other environments in the customer’s account and you can also store a snapshot for templating, backup, auditing, or version control.

And the audience quickly noticed it.

Deployment Manager was one of the highest rated sessions in the Partner Lodge at Dreamforce 2019 and it’s also the 2nd most downloaded Salesforce app which allows partners to streamline account creation, migration and setup.

Believe me, we will hear more about it in the next months!

For more information:

• Deployment Manager Trailblazer Community
• AppExchange page
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Salesforce help documentation