Marketo Custom Objects
Hi there,
Has anybody else played around with Marketo's Custom Objects feature? It's about a year old now, and I can't seem to find much discussion on it. We've recently started playing around with it in my org, and from our experience, it's incredibly buggy and a terrible user experience in general. My biggest qualm with it is how difficult it is to modify changes to any fields:
1. To edit a field on the custom object (e.g. changing the name, modifying the field type, etc), you cannot simply click "edit". You need to delete the field, re-create the field again with the changes you want, and re-publish the object.
2. To add insult to injury, you are unable to perform a modification and edit the object without needing to republish the object after every action. For instance, to delete the an existing field, you would expect the workflow to be:
- Delete "Field A"
- Create new field "Field AB"
- Republish the Custom Object
Marketo will NOT save ANY of those changes. In order to get Marketo to save them, you literally have to republish after each step. The workflow actually looks something like this:
- Delete "Field A"
- Republish Custom Object (to save action of deletion)
- Create new field "Field AB"
- Republish the Custom Object
Not the world's biggest deal if you only have to make one change, but it becomes a royal pain when you have several edits to do. This is akin to having to actively save an email or HTML template after every line item change! If anything, this actually seems like a bug to me, but after speaking with one of the support managers (specifically, Brandon Fong), it doesn't sound like it? Really terrible user experience all in all.
3. Similarly, if the field you wish to edit has already been populated with information, you're out of luck and are unable to delete, modify the type, or rename the field at all. I guess this is standard procedure with regular Marketo fields as well, but at least we are able to modify regular fields and rename to something like "DEPRECATED".
As far as I can tell, the only pros of the Marketo custom object is its REST API capabilities and the fact that it allows you to view information on the Lead level in a way that the Salesforce Custom Object never allowed you to do so. What are other folks' experience with this feature so far?