Enforce naming convention for new assets

[karstenkoehler]

Hello product team,

For HubSpot admins, one of the biggest challenges is keeping a portal organized, cleaned up and prevent overall chaos. Especially in Enterprise portals with sometimes hundreds of users, it's almost impossible to get users to follow a naming convention for email names, landing page names, workflow names. Quickly this becomes a cat and mouse game where HubSpot have to constantly chase and remind users to name their assets correctly.

Why is this currently a bad user experience for users?

Naming conventions are usually documented outside of HubSpot, in a wiki, stored as a Google Doc or something similar along the same lines. Forcing them to interrupt what they're currently doing, look up a naming convention and then come back means that they're losing time. They also have to leave HubSpot momentarily. Even then, they might misunderstand the naming convention and type in an incorrect name.

Why is this currently a bad user experience for admins?

Incorrect naming means that list or workflow filters for Recent conversion might not work. It can also mean that reports become a mess, if these reports are pulling in asset names.

If admins have to look into this on a permanent basis, in portals where there are new assets every day, this takes time away from developing the HubSpot portal and generating more value for all users.

Here's what a solution could look like

To solve this, it would be great if there were tools to enforce a naming convention. Ideally, admins would specify what constitutes a correctly named asset and similar to the forms editor, arrange fields to their liking.

Here's a quick mockup of what this could look like when creating a new page.

The user could select from dropdowns which team they belong to, the language of the assets, the asset type, include a title and date. The system would then generate a title from this that cannot be further edited.

Admins should be able to specify the options for each dropdown, separators, order and field validation (e.g. max length for a title).

(In case this is eventually introduced, please consider to make this a feature that is at least included in all Professional and Enterprise subscriptions.)

I would love to see this for all assets in HubSpot: emails, workflows, lists, campaigns, imports, properties, files etc.

Thanks in advance for reviewing!

[franksteiner79]

Plus 100 on this idea from @karstenkoehler 😄

I love the mock-up! Either the naming wizard pulls through existing information from the portal, or there are some central admin settings that let super admins define the building blocks and options for the naming convention.

[danmoyle]

Love this helpful idea for sure! Great suggestion @karstenkoehler . 

[jolle]

@karstenkoehler I love this idea! I think it would create a much cleaner experience for all users.

It would be really cool if we could also add an "order" or something like that for emails (i.e., designating "drip email 1" and "drip email 2"). 

Hopefully they're able to roll something like this out!!

[karstenkoehler]

Good point, @jolle, a numbering functionality would be very nice!

[Jnix284]

This would be an incredible improvement for admins and partners, which would in turn make it easier for all account users to follow proper naming conventions without having to remember the nuances for every process or refer to process documentation every single time to make sure it's right. 

[JOpie]

Great idea! I tried using a playbook to define using this approach. but a playbook can't create a deal or the like...I thought it would be perfect to have the opening of a playbook generate a generic deal that would then successively be named by follow-on questions in a playbook, but you can't trigger a workflow that would create a deal when a playbook is opened. 😞

[BradHarris]

Yes! Absolutely needed. We should ideally be able to create an account naming convention when setting up an account, which is then enforced for all future asset creation. It just makes so much sense. 

[JeffSchneider]

💯

Teaching a client how to use naming conventions is one thing. Getting them to refer to an Asset Naming Cheatsheet (what we create for every client) is a totally separate challenge.

I love this idea. I'd like to see admin settings where you could determine the structure of it since we likely all have different types of naming conventions or formats. So the ability to choose the first, second, third (and possibly a fourth) "segment" of the naming convention would be amazing.

[ThorstenT]

Great idea. +1

This could help enforcing name conventions through all teams without always re-assuring, that everyone is aware of the current conventions.

[Amy_Brierley]

Such a great idea! This would be very useful!

[BastiSchuhl]

This would be super powerful! 

[isabellweiss]

+1

[KMellert]

🦁Talk about a seamless process! This idea is 🔥

[SBriggs7]

This would be brilliant for deals as well

[Laiba_Zakir_w4]

Great idea! would be really helpful with multi teams/business unit accounts.

[CWolf6]

Has anyone found an app to solve this?

[terrific]

Excellent suggestion, this would be great!

[franksteiner79]

I think the new "Custom Properties and a Description field for Lists" feature by @AndresBustos is so tantillazingly close to @karstenkoehler's suggestion, it is spooky.

• We create custom properties which contain our desired naming convention options
• Instead of typing a name for a list or any other asset, it gets created from those options

I mean the ingredients are all there. Let's turn it into something practical and powerful!

[BValentine9]

Love this idea. Seems like it would make searching and reports much easier.

[AndresBustos]

As @franksteiner79 mentioned, the goal of Custom Properties in Lists & now in Workflows (public beta) is to help organize your assets better. Please let me know if you have any further feedback around how custom properties are now helping your teams achieve this.