topic Re: Workflows for development portals in Customer Feedback Tool

Workflows for development portals

AHazelton — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 13:22:13 GMT

My company has a production portal with workflows enabled and a development portal for testing in a sandbox environment. HubSpot requires a paid tier for even evaluating workflows so it is impossible for me to even prototype behaviors in a sandbox environment. This is a serious shortcoming with your offerings.

Re: Workflows for development portals

franksteiner79 — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 13:36:34 GMT

Hi @AHazelton

Could you provide some screenshots and additional information? What HubSpot subscription does your production portal have? In HubSpot there are two types test accounts:

An actual sandbox account, which requires an Enterprise subscription and comes with the workflow feature
A so called developer test account, which gives you access to a 90-day trial of the Enterprise versions of Marketing, Sales, Service, CMS, and Operations Hub - which would also include the workflow feature.

So considering the above, I am not sure in which account you are doing your testing, as both come with workflow functionality.

Cheers

Frank

Re: Workflows for development portals

AHazelton — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 16:19:32 GMT

I have access to an account type of "DEVELOPER_TEST" that when I click on the Workflows item from the menu it brings up an Upgrade to Sales Hub Professional screen.
Yesterday I created a separate sandbox account by clicking on the https://offers.hubspot.com/free-cms-developer-sandbox page and likewise, I get the same upgrade to professional to test workflows.

Looks like the production site has "Marketing Hub Enterprise" and "Sales Hub Enterprise" add ons

Re: Workflows for development portals

karstenkoehler — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 16:18:12 GMT

Hi @AHazelton,

This seems to have been changed recently. Until recently, as @franksteiner79 said, developer portals had the full Enterprise suite included.

Now, you would have to upgrade to Enterprise to access the actual sandbox feature. (The free CMS developer sandbox is different to this.) https://knowledge.hubspot.com/account/set-up-a-hubspot-standard-sandbox-account

What exactly would you like to prototype? Generally, there are also ways to do this safely in a live environment. (It's not ideal of course, I agree.)

Best regards!

Re: Workflows for development portals

AHazelton — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 16:26:25 GMT

In general, we would like to test all features in a sandbox environment before applying those changes to our production instance.
Specifically, we are developing a feature that would push a change to a Deal property. Was interested in prototyping a workflow that would send an email to the Deal contacts when that property changed to a specific value, e.g. ACTIVE -> SUSPENDED

Re: Workflows for development portals

AHazelton — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 16:28:56 GMT

Also as part of the Engineering organization, I have read-only access to the production portal while full access to the sandbox portal. So making changes to the production portal for testing is not an option.

Re: Workflows for development portals

karstenkoehler — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 16:31:10 GMT

Hi @AHazelton,

Even in a sandbox environment, you'd have to find a way to limit this to test contacts. That means that you can also set up test records in your production environment and simply restrict the enrollment criteria to only allow specific test records, e.g. by deal ID. That way, only a few select test deals could enroll and you could test your workflow.

After testing, you'd remove the additional enrollment restrictions.

Again, it's not exactly moving something from a sandbox to a live environment but as discussed above: without an Enterprise you won't get this feature, unfortunately.

Best regards!

Re: Workflows for development portals

AHazelton — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 16:43:01 GMT

Unfortunately, I am not willing to make changes and test code like this to our production server. This is part of a larger feature that automatically creates Deals as well so I would have to do all of the testing on the production server.
It really is disappointing that your company does not value full testing in a sandbox environment.

Re: Workflows for development portals

karstenkoehler — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 16:45:43 GMT

Hi @AHazelton,

I'm not a HubSpot employee. Most users in the community are individuals who spend their free time helping other users like you, aiming to provide solutions or the best workarounds.

If you want to escalate this, I'd recommend reaching out to your HubSpot account manager. If you don't know who that is, HubSpot support (chat, email, phone) can let you know.

Best regards!

Re: Workflows for development portals

franksteiner79 — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 17:02:17 GMT

Hi @AHazelton

It looks like this offer might be for a specific CMS developer account instead of an actual developer test account.

How to create a developer account and multiple test portals and accounts is outlined here. I created a new developer test account a few days account and it's fully functioning Enterprise portal with Workflows.

If your main production account does have "Marketing Hub Enterprise" and "Sales Hub Enterprise" as you said, then you could simply create a sandbox account by following those steps. But like @karstenkoehler said, you'd still have to work with some dummy contacts in order to test email sending via workflows.

Hope that helps.

Frank