DTM Plans for a Sunset

[#1]

Update: The DTM Sunset Milestone dates outlined below have all been shifted back 1–2 weeks to accommodate release cycles and company events. Individual dates may be shifted again as they approach, but we promise they won’t be sooner than what’s below.

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March 2020 Update: We’ve heard from a number of customers that the COVID-19 situation is disrupting the priority of their tagging projects, resources, and timelines. To aid with this situation, the target dates for Milestone 2 and 3 below have both been pushed out by 3 months. We’ll continue to listen to feedback from customers and may further extend the dates.

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July 2020 Update: We continue to hear from customers who are concerned about the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic is having on their migration timelines. We have resource, maintenance, and cost constraints that make it infeasible to push back Milestone 3 (the final EOL), but we have decided to shrink the read-only period from 6 months down to 2 months. This means that while the final EOL timeline is not changing — it is still April of 2021 — you’ll be able to continue to make changes to your DTM properties until February of 2021. The official dates below reflect the latest changes.

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February 2021 Update: We’ve pushed out the Milestone 2 date by 6 days to align with our release window. DTM will enter a read-only state on February 22, 2021.

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April 2021 Update: We've added 1 week to the final sunset date to align with our release cycles.  DTM will become unavailable on April 20, 2021 at around 3pm GMT/BST which is also 10am EST.

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Last November (2017), we released Launch to Production and started giving access to customers who requested it through a random selection process. At the same time, we started giving new Experience Cloud customers access to Launch instead of DTM.

Earlier this year at the US Summit (March 2018), we ended the random selection process and made Launch available to all Experience Cloud customers. Since that time, we've had close to 1,000 different customers log in and create properties in Launch. Half of them have published to their Production environment - and are using it live, we assume

This summer (July 2018), we released an upgrade process in DTM to provide a self-service, automated way to move your DTM properties into Launch. You can read more about this in the blog post and in the product docs.

We continue to add new features to Launch. In the coming months, you’ll see things that were never possible in DTM like private extensions and mobile properties for managing SDKs in your native mobile applications. You’ll also see better versions of things that DTM already has like comparing revisions and bulk copy.

Maintaining both DTM and Launch in perpetuity was never the plan and is not a sustainable path forward. Looking ahead, DTM will be in maintenance mode. We’ll keep it up-to-date with security fixes, critical bug fixes, and Experience Cloud changes.  We will not be doing any feature development.

Over the next few years, we will be introducing progressive restrictions on what you can do within DTM. We want to be transparent with those plans so that you can plan your upgrade path accordingly.

Timeline

Milestone 1: 2019–07-09

Starting in July of next year, DTM will no longer allow the creation of new properties. This will have no impact on existing properties.

Status: Complete

Milestone 2: 2021-02-22

In February of 2021, DTM properties will enter a Read-only mode. You will not be able to create or edit tools, rules, or data elements. You will no longer be able to publish to DTM environments. This will have no impact on previously published libraries.

Milestone 3: 2021-04-20

In April of 2021, DTM UI will go dark. Servers will be decommissioned, documentation will go offline, and communities will be removed.  DTM libraries that have already been published to our CDN partner will remain available at their current location.  Applications that reference these published libraries will continue to function as they do now without interruption.

We hope that by letting you know about these things in advance, you'll be able to make and execute your plans to upgrade to Launch without interruption to your business. You'll be joining your Experience Cloud peers who are taking advantage of Launch's open ecosystem, asynchronous deployments, new rule builder, and the APIs.

Happy tagging!

This post first appeared on the Launch blog.  You can follow us there.

[#2]

As much as this is appreciated, the shifting of this timeline actually has minmal-to-zero impact to our project timelines. Our business operates a code-freeze during peak and given our monthly release cycles it really does not give us any flexibility with resources at the moment - which is what we desperately need. 

If there could be consideration for an early 2021 date that would be hugely beneficial as we'd be able to de-risk our peak trading window and get this necessary migration completed. We'd be able to redeploy resources immediately and be able to adapt to this new world we're in. 

[#3]

@sophiebegley, this isn't necessarily the last adjustment to the dates.  The Milestone 2 date is still over 6 months out, but depending on how the next 2 months play out we make additional extensions.

[#4]

I guess that "Milestone 2: 2020-02-16" should be "Milestone 2: 2021-02-16"...

[#5]

@FredrikvonS, yes, I've corrected it above.

[#6]

Hello @thebenrobb .  How will there be no impact on previously published libraries when the Servers will be down? I would image that the DTM tag will not find anything after that point when calling the server?

[#7]

@elenit81164387, DTM publishes JavaScript libraries that you will either (1) host on your own, or (2) we host on a CDN.

In the 1st case, nothing we do will have any impact on those libraries that you are hosting on your own.

In the 2nd case, Launch utilizes the same CDN that DTM uses and it isn’t going anywhere. Even after DTM shuts down, any DTM libraries that you have already published will continue to remain available where they currently are on the CDN.  And any customer pages that reference those libraries on the CDN, they will continue to function as they do now. Without DTM you will no longer be able to modify the contents of those libraries (through publishing a new library), but the already published libraries themselves will remain just as they are.

[#8]

@thebenrobb 

Can you explain specifically in more detail for comprehension, what exactly will happen to DTM scripts after April 2021? Specifically, what does “DTM will no longer be available”?

[#9]

@clareowens, DTM as an app compiles and publishes a JavaScript library.  Depending on customer configuration. that library is either published to a 3rd-party CDN that we partner with or it is published to the customers own servers.  DTM and Launch utilize the same 3rd-party CDN provider, and that relationship will be maintained.  We are not going to purge DTM libraries off the CDN, so any libraries that DTM has already published will remain available for retrieval from the CDN.  Thus the statement "This will have no impact on previously published libraries."

"DTM will no longer be available" means that DTM will not be available.  The servers will shut down.  There will be no UI to login to.  There will be no more viewing of tools, data elements, or rules.  You will no longer be able to modify the contents of the libraries that are published to the CDN.

[#10]

@thebenrobb 
I'd like to reaffirm that whatever libraries published on CDN eg: //assets.adobedtm.com/<num>/satelliteLib-<num>.js will always be available, right? Thanks a lot. 

[#11]

@thebenrobb : i have the same question

[#12]

@thebenrobb  I've just published a property that was linked from DTM to Launch and now their tracking is complety gone. Within Launch, the "Use linked DTM embed code" option no longer works. So something is definitely not working as promised.
The below keeps defaulting back to "Load Library Asynchronously" 

Is this by design or is this an actual bug? 
I've raised this with support as our client is without tracking. But the expectation was that anything related to releases would continue working as before. I'm surprised that within the UI there are things happening that isn't allowing us to publish to the already existing embed code.

Thoughts or anyone within your team that should be looking into this? 

[#13]

@Web_Analytics_N, the best route to resolution for this is to log a ticket with customer care.  That will allow you to share the necessary information (Company, property, etc) and will allow the engineering team to take a look and report back to you in the most efficient way.

We have not heard of any other incidents like this.  The linked embed codes should definitely still function as they did before (though obviously you'd need to set them up through Launch now instead of using the checkbox in DTM).

I'd also recommend that you actually just load up the library in your browser (put the old embed code from the site directly into your URL bar and load it up and see what is there.  That's probably the first thing the devlopment team will do.