As October draws to a close, we’re excited to highlight the release of two important enhancements to Pardot’s Engagement Studio: program locking and versioning. These two features come highly requested by our users, and we hope that they will significantly impact the ease of use and flexibility of the Engagement Program building process.
Program Locking
If your organization has several users who edit Engagement Programs, you may occasionally discover that another user already has the program open for editing. This overlap can lead to a number of problems (with the most frustrating being lost or overwritten edits), so we’ve introduced Program Locking, a new feature that will prevent multiple users from editing the same Program at the same time.
When a user is editing an Engagement Studio program, the Program will become locked; no other users will be able to edit the Program until the original editing user closes, navigates away from, or starts the program. For a non-editing user, a lock icon will be visible in the main Engagement Studio table next to the program name, and if they click into the program, they will see [LOCKED] in the program name and will be unable to edit any of the steps within the program.
Locking for Engagement Studio programs makes it easy to identify the programs that are currently being edited, and allows users to feel confident that the edits they make will be properly saved. Users are still able to view the flow and steps in read-only mode when the program is locked, and administrators are provided with an option to override a locked program when necessary. To learn more about locking, please check out the Knowledge Base article on this topic.
Versioning
Versioning for Engagement Studio is an exciting first step in helping our customers to understand the impact of changes made to their Engagement Programs over time. This feature allows users to easily edit their existing programs to accommodate changes to specific steps within the existing program flow. Whether these changes are due to fixing mistakes, testing different steps, or revising in response to performance results, users will now be able to tweak the steps in their program — i.e., change an existing Rule to a different Rule, Action to Action, and Trigger to Trigger.
The changes to the program steps will be recorded as a part of a new program ‘version’ and each version will have a unique name. A history of the versions, as well as the date and times of the starts and pauses, will be recorded in the new Activities tab (found next to the ‘Build,’ ‘Test,’ and ‘Report’ tabs), making it easy to understand when a program was edited.
Engagement Studio reporting has also been updated to display version-specific stats via drop-downs on the Report Cards. Only steps that were edited will offer the versions drop-down, and the Report Card will display the unique dates a version was active. All of this allows for further historical reporting insights for each step within a program.
Learn more about Engagement Studio versioning on the Pardot Knowledge Base, and as always, continue to share your feedback on the Idea Exchange here.