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!

[karstenkoehler]

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. 

[EBöhm]

💯

[karstenkoehler]

@AndresBustos thanks for working on custom properties for lists and workflows – this request goes further however.

With users of different backgrounds, I'm typically facing a mess of different separators (vertical bars, underscores, hyphens), different date formats and overall different ways of ordering elements of an asset name. There currently isn't any way in HubSpot to get control of this and have a clean approach to asset names.

I assume that HubSpot will at some point introduce asset workflows, which would allow for automatically naming lists and workflows based on list and workflow personalization tokens – but that's probably not something we'll see soon. (I'd love to be proven wrong?)

While I assume that we'll also get properties for forms, emails, reports etc eventually, there not here yet and inconsistently named assets are one of the biggest headaches for portal admins.

All in all, it would be great to have more control over asset names. This request has almost 100 upvotes in less than a year which clearly shows that it's addressing a pain of many users, a lot of which I'd consider power users.

If you could evaluate it or pass it on to the product team that would, I'd appreciate that a lot.

Thanks in advance!

[karstenkoehler]

Thank you @AndresBustos - the custom properties are great but they don't scratch the same itch. Even with workflow properties, workflow names can be a mess and thus challenging for admins. Also, required workflow properties can be bypassed by simply cloning an existing workflow. Happy to jump on a call if that helps!

[SHinojosa3]

@karstenkoehler - This is such a great idea! This would help us focus on using the tool rather than enforcing certain naming conventions and data clean up. 

Have you heard anything from HubSpot about this idea?

[Patrick_Saab]

@karstenkoehler I completely agree with you, wherever I go this is my biggest painpoint and would love to have a way to enforce naming conventions!! Big upvote 🙂

[ADodge603]

Love this idea!

[dlaguna-AbH]

This is absolutely essential. 🚀