Is it worth having a sandbox?

Anonymous · ‎01-13-2016

I had a Marketo sandbox for our initial setup but have never otherwise used one. For those of you with a sandbox, is it worth the extra cost? Do you integrate your Marketo sandbox to your fullcopy SFDC sandbox? Does everyone get access or is it limited provisioning? How often do you refresh? How does testing work? Do you get access to releases early with sandbox?

I come from a strong process background for SFDC and we do everything in sandbox before implementing in production. Pros/cons to this approach in Marketo?

Appreciate the feedback as I'm trying to get my tech budget together

Edward_Unthank_ · ‎01-13-2016

I personally don't think the Sandbox is worth the money. I would instead spend that money on Workspaces and Partition.

It functions as a pseudo-sandbox in terms of development process—it's actually just a separate Marketo instance with the same functionality as your normal Marketo instance (with a few more limitations), only labeled as a "sandbox." The instances aren't mirrored automatically, and the proposed process is to build in the Sandbox instance and then import the program into the Production instance—that's a lot of manual work, with all the considerations of that process. It requires reactivating all smart campaigns, for one.

The Sandbox, when it's created, is a carbon copy of your Production instance. After that point in time, though, the Sandbox and Production instances lose that mirroring automatically, and can only be kept up through spending lots of time doubling your effort to keep them mirrored—a not-worthwhile amount of time and effort, especially considering the reality of quick, on-the-fly changes that need to happen in Production.

I think Workspaces and Partitions provide a better solution for: allowing new Marketo users to train in their own silo'ed partition and workspace, having a "Development" workspace/partition that is much easier to move the final product over to your "Production" workspace/partition, and it also gives you the other benefit of having workspaces and partitions anyway. Things like giving you the ability to have internal communications and employee leads in their own partition, or other random communication interests that come up which don't perfectly fit with your normal Marketo usage.

Cheers,

Edward Unthank

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