Provide a mechanism to prevent import of incorrect field values

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Currently, it is impossible to prevent user to import incorrect (values that are not in a pick list, or values that will be blocked by CRM sync, or simply values that do not make sense, business-wise) values in Marketo. As result, users sometimes make big mistakes and create havoc in the database.

We recently had a use case where someone imported 25000 leads with nonsense values in the "salutation field". Then the data management smart campaigns triggered and removed this incorrect values, only to replace these by NULL. The result is that the initial values of these 25000 records were lost. We had to use a complex set of "data value changed" filters to rebuild them...

So this idea is that, in the field management section of the admin, together with the "List Import Alias", we should be able to set the "List Import acceptable values". An even better solution would be a comprehensive management of enum fields (see ), but if at least we could limit what is done on import, that would be a good start.

-Greg

[Robb_Barrett]

Looks like we both had the same idea.

[Robb_Barrett]

A big problem for us comes with country code matching.  We're a global company but the centralized team is U.S. based which gives everything a U.S. bias.  With this, even US, not E.U. as my Latino friends might say, causes an issue when we import leads into a list with a country name, which drives a workflow moving leads into partitions.

As we all know, the Lead database is a very flat object without any normalization so we can't reject values that aren't acceptable. I can't stop an import or reject a row with EU in the country name because it doesn't conform with U.S.

Overall the data model in Marketo needs some serious modernization to give it a more star schema style an n:1 and 1:n attribute tables.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Dan

To add to the confusion, on our side of the Atlantic, EU usually means European Union

-Greg

[Robb_Barrett]

Different english spellings alone have been killing me for months now.  The non-American English oe and ae characters are popping up as are accent marks and non-American English characters.  A project that was supposed to be delivered months ago has been delayed as we try to get consensus on product names and local vs. American / English spellings.  I need bilingual experts in every language who can translate for me as I can't always assume I'm going to have an American English expert entering product names and without a way to normalize values it's a real PITA.

It would be AWESOME if I could normalize LOVs. I'd love it if I could move away from everything being free-form text.

But back to this point, it's truly a point of failure that anyone can request an import and then, with no way to preview the import or check for values that are out of range, the import process will begin and cannot be halted even by Marketo support. It can truly become a poison pill if someone makes the slightest mistake.

I always say "You can't make a mistake with Marketo.  You make 60,000 mistakes simultaneously."

[Geoff_Krajeski1]

We've seen similar issues with non-UTF-8 formatted data.

It makes for lots of data scrubs, intricate filters, and other considerations

This accepted values is a great idea so that the import does not stop upon the first field that returns an error.