Schedule / Approve Imports before they kick off

[Robb_Barrett]

I think the import process should be reviewed.  Working for a global company, there is no night time, no midnight.  When someone imports a large list of leads in Africa or India it kills mid-day productivity in the U.S. and vice-versa.  This may be "Big company problems" but for us it's a nightmare.

Today someone imported about 10,000 leads at a time that was nighttime for them. Since 11am today (it's 5pm now) our entire Marketo instance has had a clogged up campaign queue.  Leads aren't synching to SFDC, alerts aren't going out, scoring programs not kicking off.

Previously I had someone in India import a list of leads with blank email addresses which wreaked havoc. A few thousand leads duplicated into over a million records.

I would love to see an approval process for imports, along with ability to schedule them and/or batch.  I'd like to be able to schedule a big list on Monday to kick off on Friday at nighttime PST when they won't interfere with anyone else.  I'd like to be able to review imports before letting lesser trained staff kill our production instance for 2-3 days because of an error.

These are SERIOUS productivity issues and I know that don't apply to all companies but for the few of us who have to deal with this it's a VERY BIG DEAL.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Robb,

Fully agreed, this is one of these features that are important for large, enterprise customers.

-Greg

[Casey_Grimes]

I cannot cosign this emphatically enough. In addition to the scenario Robb has given, which in and of itself is painful, there's also varying levels of technical prowess working in Marketo in a majority of instances, and it only takes one person not understanding something to:

- Ruin character encoding

- Create (tens or hundreds of...) thousands of duplicates

- Create (tens or hundreds of...) thousands of blank records

- Improperly shift data through fields

- And so forth.

Having some sort of control for admins to sign off on list imports would be a huge boon.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Agreed. A smaller/local company too (for the reasons Courtney mentioned) can be brought to a halt.

How about gatewaying all imports through the REST API, so you can validate/queue/approve/etc.?

[Robb_Barrett]

We're working on that, but that's probably an expensive solution for SMBs that don't have developers. It should just be included.

A few weeks ago, someone on our team imported a list with a bunch of blank records. She didn't know they were in the CSV.  It ended up creating over a million blank records due to blank:blank matching. Slowed down our instance for over a week. Marketo technical support couldn't cancel it, we had a crippled instance until it finished going through all of the normal workflows.

[SanfordWhiteman]

We're working on that, but that's probably an expensive solution for SMBs that don't have developers. It should just be included.

I kind of meant a third-party solution.

For optimal modularization, I think Marketo should have an option Allow signed import files only (with only Admins allowed to upload unsigned files). This would allow for any third-party app to validate and sign import files, but the files wouldn't have to be uploaded directly from that app, they could still be uploaded via the Marketo UI (eliminating certain other points of failure and complexity).