Salesforce Marketing Cloud Deployment Manager

Copying journeys and automations from one business unit to another: The Deployment Manager makes it possible

As is well known, the Marketing Cloud does not offer sandboxes in which journeys, automations, data extensions or emails can be built and then deployed. So anyone who wanted to replicate content in another BU had to completely rebuild and configure it there until some time ago.

Since 2019, Deployment Manager has been providing at least partial relief: Journey and automation configurations as well as data extensions can now be transferred from one BU to another. A snapshot of the journey/ automation is created and made available for download as a JSON file. The file can then be uploaded again to the target BU.

We've tested the feature and find that it makes deployment much easier. However, you shouldn't expect a 1:1 copy: For both journeys and automations, activities must be manually reworked in the target BU; in addition, data extensions can only be deployed if they are not sendable or testable. For the future, it would also be desirable to be able to deploy emails and templates in order to get an alternative to sharing in Content Builder.

Here you can find information about Deployment Manager on AppExchange.

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