Universal Sandbox

Let me start with the conclusion for this post: Universal sandbox will change the way admins work with sandboxes, and how Engagement Cloud can be extended … BIG TIME !

There is a lot to cover, and a lot to take in, so I will be dedicating 2 posts to cover the new capabilities:

• This post covers how the managing new universal sandboxes has changed
• My next post to cover how parallel development will change the way we extend Engagement Cloud.

Universal sandbox

The way sandboxes are created has completely changed. We now have to specify which tools we want to use a sandbox. We also can choose the context in which we want to use page composer from the sandbox creation screen.

This not only makes us think upfront what we want to change, but also allows us to better understand what sandboxes are being used for by other admins e.g. imagine creating a sandbox to change the menu structure and then noticing someone else already created a sandbox to do the same thing.

If by accident you have forgotten to specify one of the tools you need, don’t panic. You can always add them from the sandbox toolbar once the sandbox has been created.

Universal sandbox toolbar

Once a universal sandbox is created and activated, a new sandbox toolbar pops up. The new toolbar allows us to:

• Manage sandboxes with ease by having easy leaving or publishing a sandbox.
• Navigating between the tools can be done directly from the sandbox toolbar which makes extending Engagement Cloud a lot easier
• When using Page Composer, Sandbox Mode allows us to switch between edit and preview mode and configuring Engagement Cloud for a specific role only
• The notification icon will keep us up to date of whom has been publishing what sandboxes

Publishing a sandbox

You might want to spend a bit more time on publishing a sandbox than in the past though. This is where the biggest change starts to become apparent: parallel development is supported in a completely different way!

When publishing a sandbox, we need to make sure our sandboxes are ‘up to date first’. We need to make sure that any other published changed from other sandboxes are completely and successfully merged into our sandboxes before we can publish ours.

But more on parallel development in my next post !

Universal Sandbox is for the moment under controlled availability and is an opt-in feature. More info can be found here.