Developer Sandbox

Developer Sandbox

One idea that exists in the Salesforce world and I think has spurred the adoption of that platform tremendously,  but that doesn't exist in Marketo yet is that of a developer sandbox.  As Marketo plays a more central role as a multi-channel marketing automation platform - not everything gets routed through CRM's these days - and would play a pivotal role in helping developers better understand how to interact with a marketo instance.  The "developer sandbox" would be different than a sandbox tied to a customer's contract as it would be:

  • Free
  • Would be limited to 1-2 users
  • Intended for developers to learn how to interact with a Marketo instance - and develop a single piece of new custom integration
  • Could have additonal limitations:
    • Person Record limit
    • Emails Sent per day
    • Very limited activity history retention

Why would Marketo want to even bother with this?

  • Sandboxes are meant to be an isolated environment for testing something.  As a marketo customer adds teams, groups & divisions who all want to interact with Marketo, having a "developer sandbox" is one way that one developer can try out new ideas with his/her code and not be impacted by code from another developer in the same company.
  • Is in keeping with the open & transparent model that Marketo is following - now more documentation is public for the world to enjoy - why not open up the actual application as well? As new integrations are coded, a new ecosystem will emerge - these will likely expand the offerings on LaunchPoint.
  • There are other marketing automation platforms that offer limited "trial" versions of a product.
2 Comments
Grégoire_Miche2
Level 10

Hi Luiz,

Marketo partners can already benefit from a sandbox, provided that they reach a certain level of partnership.

But I agree that copying SFDC approach here would be valuable.

-Greg

kh-lschutte
Community Manager
Status changed to: Open Ideas