Marketo workspaces and partitions for regional teams

What workspaces and partitions are

Adobe’s definition is compact. Workspaces “are separate areas in Marketo that hold marketing assets like programs, landing pages, emails and more,” typically split by geography or business unit. Person partitions “act like separate databases. Each partition has its own people that do not de-dupe or mix with other partitions.”

The two are mapped to each other when a workspace is created. A workspace can use one partition, several or all of them and one partition can serve several workspaces. Each workspace has a primary partition which “acts as the default and is where all people will be assigned” when they arrive through that workspace.

The simplest regional design is one workspace and one partition per region: EMEA’s programs in EMEA’s workspace, reaching EMEA’s people. A company whose regions share customers often keeps one partition and gives each region a workspace so the people are shared and only the assets are separate. A company with hard data boundaries between entities uses separate partitions and accepts that a contact who deals with two entities is two records.

What crosses the line and what doesn’t

Workspaces are separate by default. A handful of things can be shared across them, always from a parent folder and always read-only on the receiving side: email templates, landing page templates, models, smart campaigns, smart lists, segmentations and snippets. The receiving workspace sees the folder with a padlock. That is how a central team gives every region the brand’s templates and the global suppression lists without letting regions edit them.

Programs, emails, landing pages and forms can’t be shared. They can be cloned into another workspace if the user has access to both and emails, forms and landing pages have to be inside a program when cloned. Any templates the program depends on must be shared with the destination first. Assets can be moved by dragging their folder across, except that “a program that has members can’t be moved between workspaces.”

Segmentations have a limit of their own: 20 per subscription across all workspaces which Adobe suggests managing by creating them in a default workspace that sees all partitions and sharing them out.

Partitions don’t interact. The same email address can exist in two partitions as two people and nothing will merge them. Adobe treats that as a feature for businesses that need duplicates and recommends talking to Support before choosing it.

Roles per workspace

Access to a workspace comes through roles. A user is given a role in a workspace so a regional marketer can be a Marketing User in the EMEA workspace and nothing anywhere else and a central Ops user can be an Admin everywhere. Users added through the Adobe Admin Console arrive as a Standard User in the Default workspace and have to be adjusted in Marketo. Two permissions exist specifically for this setup: Admin access for a specific Workspace and Move assets between Workspaces.

Adobe’s knowledge base warns that a user holding two roles can end up with the more restrictive permissions of the two and recommends one role per user which matters when a regional user also needs something from a shared workspace.

Why the setup deserves care

Adobe’s documentation is candid that workspaces “can be complex to set up” and recommends contacting Marketo Support to confirm they fit your needs. Much of the complexity shows up later, once regions have been working in their workspaces for a while and the early decisions are hard to change.

Partitions are permanent decisions

A partition can’t be merged back later. Duplicates across partitions are by design and so are the two activity histories, two scores and two sync records that come with them. Choosing partitions for a regional split that turns out to share customers is expensive to undo.

Sharing works by folder

You share a folder rather than an asset and only parent folders. Teams end up designing their folder trees around what will be shared rather than around what makes sense. Share a folder of ten templates with a region that should only see nine and the tenth goes along with them.

Shared templates are read-only and still open inside

A shared template can’t be edited by the region. An email made from it can, within whatever the template leaves editable. Brand consistency across workspaces is still a matter of content locking in the Email Designer and of who holds the Approve Email permission in each workspace.

Every regional marketer is a Marketo user

Inside their workspace a regional Marketing User has the whole product: programs, smart lists, flow steps, list import, scheduling. The workspace limits the blast radius to one region. It doesn’t reduce what the person has to know to send safely which means licenses, training and the same mistakes per region that a single team would make once.

Approval is per asset, per workspace

Marketo approves emails and landing pages rather than campaigns and the Approve permissions are granted per role per workspace. There is no workflow that routes a regional campaign to a regional manager and then to central Ops. Either the region can approve its own emails, or it can’t and every send waits for someone who can.

Central visibility fragments

Reporting runs per workspace. Program Performance in EMEA’s workspace knows nothing about APAC’s programs and the question “what went out across all regions last month, from which templates, to whom” means an Analytics User visiting each workspace or a data export. Companies that run a separate Marketo instance for a region because of local requirements split the picture again and anyone with Eloqua in another business unit has a third system.

Shared people, uncoordinated sends

Where regions share a partition they share people and each region’s smart campaigns run their own communication limits and their own exclusions. The contact at a global account hears from every region that considers them theirs.

Regional self-service on top of workspaces

None of this argues against workspaces. They are the right way to separate assets and roles in one Marketo instance and most global teams should use them. They just don’t answer the question that keeps regional campaigns in central Ops’s queue which is how a local marketer sends a campaign without becoming a Marketo expert and without central Ops building it.

Campaign Launchpad answers it from outside the workspace. Launchpad builds each campaign inside your Marketo instance, in the workspace and partition where it belongs so the structure you have stays as it is. What changes is the regional marketer’s side:

• Ops builds wizards for the campaigns regions run and the region or country is a choice in the wizard. That choice sets the templates offered, the audiences available, the naming convention and the approvers so one wizard serves every region with each region’s rules.
• Templates are locked to the zones Ops opened so the shared template’s read-only status is backed by an editor that can’t do anything the template forbids.
• Audiences come from the lists Ops allowed for that region and any uploaded file is validated against Ops’s rules before it reaches the partition.
• Approvals can go to a regional manager, then central Ops, then legal, or any order and number Ops sets per wizard, with the decision kept on the campaign.
• Marketers don’t need a Marketo role in any workspace. They work in Launchpad.

For central Ops the fragmentation reverses. Every campaign from every region sits in one queue with a deadline on anything that needs a hand. Results are reported per campaign, template and sender across all workspaces and one Launchpad account can connect to any number of Marketo instances and Eloqua instances besides so a company with regional instances or mixed platforms sees it all in one place.