Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) – Deployment

The Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) deployment is quite an interesting subject.

Marketing Cloud (MC) still isn’t part of the core Salesforce Platform. As a result, it lacks pivotal elements that fuel development on the other Salesforce Clouds.

MC don’t have sandbox instances. No Dev, Test instances to think about deployments. Instead, we have Business Units (BUs).?And please don’t get confused a BU with a Salesforce Sandbox. BU is completely different from a Sandbox. It’s not a sandbox replacement either. We can consider BU as another production instance for our account. BUs allow us to control access to information, and the sharing of information.

If you ever built assets in MC and tried to move them from one BU to another in SFMC, you must know there was never a reliable tool to use. Absolutely no tools to deploy from one Marketing Cloud BU to other Marketing Cloud BUs or Enterprises, until Salesforce Labs released an app called the Deployment Manager (DM).

Currently we are lucky we have options available to move assets between BUs or complete a migration. The DM app provides the ability to move items between BUs without needing to reconfigure everything. DM in short allows us to take a snapshot in SFMC, download the snapshot, and re-deploy it into a different BU or SFMC account. This allows to moving assets from a staging to production BU.?

The tool is very useful and saves a lot of time in replicating the items. While very powerful and extremely useful, DM doesn’t exactly capture everything and deploy it in perfect working order. There are things that it cannot move.?

DM clones the framework, the structure of journeys and automation, but the journey configuration and automation activities that have dependencies on Salesforce objects will not be copied. It's limited to data extensions and journeys. Only replicates the design (canvas structure) of journeys, doesn’t store or migrate any customer or campaign data.

This means that manual configuration is still required which reduces efficiency and scalability as items have to be manually selected. So, the takeaway is we can save a ton of time with DM; however, chances are there we still have items that need to be manually moved or configured after we deploy our snapshot. That’s why, the DM wasn’t enough.

Later to overcome some of these challenges Salesforce Labs has introduced Marketing Cloud Package Manager (PM) on top of the Deployment Manager.?

Currently both the applications are available on Salesforce AppExchange, but PM includes more advanced features and support for more objects. PM lets you?create bundled packages for Journeys, Automations and Campaigns. While the PM is promising, but it also has limitations. The problem with Package Manager is that if an error is found nothing can be deployed. In addition, Inbox messages are not supported by either of the tools.

Here’s a high-level comparison of the two products SFMC Deployment Manager Vs Package Manager.

Things have improved with the launch of DM and PM; however, we are nowhere near the tools and DevOps process available in SFMC. Unfortunately, the effort required to plan and configure the testing environment and deployment processes in SFMC is still misunderstood.

Currently we have two options in SFMC if we need a testing environment -

1. Enable a business unit as a testing environment
2. Purchase a separate instance of SFMC?

Later, Accenture set out to solve few of these problems by building a DevOps solution for Marketing Cloud. After their solution — ‘SFMC DevTools (mcdev)’, it’s been observed Teams can save up to 80% time on their rollouts.

mcdev is a rapid deployment, rollout, backup and development tool for SFMC. It allows us to retrieve and deploy configuration and code across BUs and instances. mcdev fast-track our developers and devops engineers by allowing them to programmatically copy-paste / deploy changes.

Replicating data, content, journeys and automations across MC Business Units and Accounts requires significant manual effort, but thanks to the recent release of ‘Accenture SFMC DevTools (mcdev)’ as now we have option for enabling rapid deployment across environments by automating the deployment of SFMC projects.

Key benefits include:

• Faster Go-Live
• Reduced Manual Work
• End-to-End Version Control

We can think of mcdev as the next generation of DevOps tools for SFMC, focused on Scalability, Speed and Sharing best practices.