Well, hang onto your hats Marketo folks, because Adobe is making announcements and plans, all of which will impact the way you use Marketo from later this year.
Over the past few weeks, Adobe has been teasing their customers with sneak peeks of what is known as the Marketo Engage Unified Experience.
What’s That?
Well Marketo Engage is the new name for Marketo. Marketo Engage Unified Experience is a way of saying that Marketo is taking a bit of the old, a bit of the new, sprucing it up, and bringing them together into one unified interface.
What Happened to Marketo Sky?
Marketo Sky, the next generation interface for Marketo, has been in open beta for all users since 2018. There has been some really cool innovations and features added into Sky – and we’re just as as excited to see what this new Unified Experience brings. Until now, anyone using Sky has tended to use both Sky and Classic together, which to be honest was less then optimal.
The Sky project was also started prior to the Adobe acquisition, and just didn’t have the look and feel of an Adobe product, obviously. This new UI is going to be an awesome ‘flavouring’ of the Marketo UI – Adobe products really rock as far as UI is concerned.
So, Marketo have taken on customer feedback about Marketo Sky, and listened to the UX gurus at Adobe, and between now and November 2020 you will start to see the results, a true next generation of the Marketo platform. Eventually, Marketo Sky will disappear.
Phase Zero – Marketo Gets a Facelift
The first iteration of the Marketo Engage Unified Experience will get rolled out to ALL Marketo customers between August and November, 2020.
When you will get the new-look interface largely depends on what features you use. Some features, such as workspace support, will be added towards the end of this time period. You can guarantee that the larger your instance, and the more features you use (especially workspaces), that you will likely be in the last rollout of the new interface in November.
What the first iteration (or Phase Zero as Adobe is calling it) will do, is bring in a new tree, a new header bar, and remove the “powerball” menu, so the way you navigate around Marketo will change. These elements, including all the tree icons, have been updated. Nothing in the palette area of Marketo will change in this release, but all the new functionality in the tree that had been introduced in Marketo Sky, plus the new global search capability, will be in the tree and nav bar in this first release.
At this point, Marketo Sky will still be available, and will still launch in a separate window from the My Marketo screen. You can continue to use features there such as predictive audiences, mass asset updates, and event registration caps, that you may have started using in Sky.
The only features that will go away in this upgrade is the ability to drag and drop elements within the tree. However, some context menu items (that menu when you right-click) have been added in order for you to move things around the tree or into engagement programs. Plus, the much-anticipated functionality of being able to build program folders and then create assets and campaigns directly into those folders so you don’t have to move them will be introduced. That will take away a lot of the sting of that loss, but product management promise the tree drag and drop functionality will return sometime in 2021.
In summary, there’ll be a new supercharged tree full of Marketo Sky features, and a new top navigation bringing Marketo Engage more in-line with other products in the Adobe Digital Experience family. Everything inside that will be the same in this release.
Your instance’s main URL will change. However, deep links into Marketo that are currently in your documentation will redirect indefinitely, so you’ve got some time to get everything updated and switched over to the new interface.
When will I be upgraded to Phase Zero?
Marketo will let you know through your Customer Success Manager and by email when you will be upgraded. There will be three upgrade windows throughout the latter part of 2020, and most customers will fall into the middle one, which will be around September/October.
This Phase Zero release will go to all customers in their turn. This will be controlled by Adobe – alas you cannot bring it on sooner 🙂
What Happens Then?
After Phase Zero has been rolled out, Marketo will continue the release process into 2021 with Phases 1 and 2 of the new unified interface. They’ll start by incorporating many new features currently available only in Marketo Sky into the core interface, plus updating many of the core screens with newer designs.
Adobe’s UX teams have been hard at work, and some of the preview results I’ve seen are stunning. The new interface will also include improved functionality for vision impaired users.
These later releases will come with a feature by feature “opt-in” function. Marketo will release a toggle switch on new features, allowing them to be used by everyone OR only by administrators initially in order to update documentation and training for a rollout.
Once admins are ready, they’ll get to choose when to roll out new features to users, and it will be controllable at the Marketo role level. Enterprise organisations will be able to control the rollout strictly, and smaller organisations with fewer users can jump straight in. It’ll be up to you!
Later in 2021, once all the features have been ported across, Marketo Sky will be disabled. Once that happens, Marketo will become “one” product again, a true Marketo Engage Unified Experience that is available to all Marketo users!
Where can I get more information?
Want more? Well, stay tuned to our communications because we are going to let our customers know everything we know a soon as we know it. You can also reach out to your Marketo Customer Success Manager for details. Please don’t log a support ticket, Marketo Support can’t help with this!
Read more!
Read Part 2 and Part 3 of Veronica’s Marketo Engage Unified Experience blog series.
