🗣️ [Mentor Michelle Chopin] 🌟 Adobe Marketo Engage Community Mentorship Program 2024 🌟

[aschultz671]

Workspace is to marketing activities as partition is to database.

For example, my organization has almost 20 workspaces to help keep things organized and also limit newer marketo users from making changes to the wrong programs. Some users in my org only have access to the specific workspaces that they need. 

Partitions might be used if an org has several unique and defined groups that they are targeting and want to keep a "clean" person record.

I'm not as familiar with partitions, but my understanding is that a lead could exist in multiple partitions so they could have different info on each of their person records? 

[michellechopin]

Thanks for a great, detailed answer @aschultz671! 

There are definitely many benefits to breaking up a Marketo instance into separate workspaces and partitions - our last Marketo instance here was broken into three workspaces because my team was responsible for three brands (two acquired by the other) that we had to keep separate until we were officially under the purchasing company. You noted that your organization has 20 workspaces 😮 - is that easy or hard for you to manage? Are your workspaces organized by brand or client perhaps?

You are correct that a lead can be in multiple partitions, but it's important to remember that they are not shared across those partitions - a lead would have different Record IDs in each partition; you can "send" leads from one to another if there is a need to do so. I would assume that the information available on each lead could be different in each partition because data is uploaded/added to a partition specifically and/or leads can come in through forms that only exist in a single workspace (forms are one of the few items that cannot be shared across workspaces but can be cloned to create a new version in a new partition) - i.e. the lead could have two different names if they filled out a form or their data was uploaded as John Smith in one partition and Johnathan Smith on another. Also using different field labels on each form could generate different information from the Person too!

Having said that, one workspace can access/be connected to multiple partitions so that could potentially complicate having the same lead in multiple partitions, especially if there is a single form that the lead in its various partitions can access. Definitely something to consider in those cases!

[aschultz671]

We have them separated by teams/business units. I really only work within 6 regularly, so it's pretty simple to manage on a day-to-day basis from a practical perspective. We have a pretty consistent/hefty asset labeling method we've followed since we started using marketo to keep things tidy as well.

As far as the partitions go, I don't believe we have multiple, I think we pull from the same database for everyone, which for our use case makes sense. Especially for us, I believe there are a few examples of someone filling out a form in one workspace, but the info they input is then populated in their record so other business units can utilize that info as well. We want to have consistent data across workspaces to avoid the duplicates problem you mention with separate partitions. 

[michellechopin]

Organizing processes and workspaces like this makes so much sense, @aschultz671! I get so much satisfaction out of organizing and streamlining things - not only does it make life easier for us spending all our time in the workspace/instance, but should anyone else need to get in there, it's (ideally/hopefully) easy for them to jump right in and see how things work. 

Making your data available to other groups in a straightforward manner is always best - it prevents data from being siloed and also helps people to trust the data that you have (and as Marketing people, we know how important that data trust can be!).

[Nihal]

Workspace and Partitions.

Workspaces are to separate the marketing assets like (emails, landing pages, and programs). The best example for a workspace would be having a separate workspace for each business region (EMEA, APAC, AMER).

Partitions are used to create a separate database for one workspace or many workspace. Records in that database are not accessible to the other workspace.

@michellechopin, I have a question on the partition part. It would be great if you could share a use case or explain it.

Q - What if we have used one partition on many workspaces? How can we tackle duplicate records?

[michellechopin]

Great answer, @Nihal! Regions are a great example of a workspace use case, making it easy to keep assets simple when it comes to language, spelling, and even privacy needs.

For your example, if you're using only one partition that connects to multiple workspaces, then duplicates would be managed the same way as if you had one workspace to one partition - Marketo will use its deduplication feature where possible (note: Marketo can/will allow duplicates in some occasions - check out this awesome Community post about it: Deduplication: How It Works, and When It Doesn't). 

However, you would have to consider, based on how your workspaces are split up, what impact that has on your partition - for example, if you have one partition that is connected your EMEA, APAC, and AMER workspaces, you'd need to think about how you would segment that data or use fields to identify which region the lead belongs to so you can address them differently as needed (privacy is the big one that comes to mind here as GDPR only applies to EMEA). When workspaces are separated in distinctive ways, like this, it might be a better option to use separate partitions for each one - then you can be sure that leads are separated out the gate and not have to worry whether data is marked/stamped/segmented with specific information (while automation can help us with this, we always want to keep human/process errors in mind). When workspaces are split up based on brand, then it might make sense to have a single partition as the leads don't need to be separate as specifically. For example, before we relaunched our Marketo instance under a single brand, we managed three workspaces - one was my company, the second was company acquired at the same time, and the third was the parent company. This allowed us to access the same database for all three, and manage our messaging based on various data points like location or behavior.

[TarunMittal_12]

Using workspaces and Partitions we can organize the marketing content and database contacts. Marketing content will be housed in workspaces, while the records will be stored in the partitions.

Workspaces are a useful for organizing and managing marketing assets such as forms, emails, landing pages, and programs.
For example It can be useful for the companies having multiple marketing teams for different regions. They can create separate workspaces for each region and each workspace has its own set of marketing assets.
Multiple users can use workspaces, and based on the roles and permissions set up in Marketo instance, each user may be able to access one or more workspaces.

Partitions are useful to manage database. Each partition will function like a separate database and each of them contain its own records which can not be mixed with other partitions.
For instance a multi region company (NAM, EUR..etc.) can create lead partitions for each region to ensure that leads from North America are only accessible to the North American team and not to the European team.

[michellechopin]

Great definition, @TarunMittal_12 😃 

This goes to show how workspaces and partitions can help an organization separate its marketing activities/initiatives and audiences based on whatever segmentation makes the most sense for them, whether it's by region, product offering, brand, etc.

[traba5058]

Hi Michelle, a workspace hold all of the content (Design Studio & Marketing Activities) while a partition holds the data (leads). In our instance, we have a workspace & partition for each of our client-partners to manage their brands and content as well as their leads. We are also unique in that our lead number (EFCID) is the identifier on the lead record rather than the email address. Many times multiple institutions are marketing to the same prospective student, so the student has to be loaded into each partition. We are also using our own unsubscribe rather than the Marketo process for that same reason. We need prospective students to be able to unsubscribe from the specific institution rather than our Marketo instance and all institutions.

[michellechopin]

Thanks for the definition and sharing your experience, @traba5058 😀

This is super cool to learn how your organization uses workspaces and partitions to service students, and the need to use your own unsubscribe system to accommodate your use case.

Using the student ID makes so much sense as a unique identifier (email address isn't considered a unique identifier in Marketo and is only used as a deduplication tool for lead creation/update via other tools) - I imagine it works much the same way as the Lead/Person ID in Marketo (entirely unique and set up by a/the system).