Why use ANA: #
Many organizations recognize the importance of having good asset names. Good asset names are very basic, and they have the capacity to make the workplace more organized and sorted. With good names, team members spend lesser time looking for assets and more time at getting things done.
Having to click into each asset to only realize that, that was not the asset can be frustrating, and can be stressful when under pressure.
We need good asset names that describe the asset without having to click into it.
Good asset names are representations of the properties of an asset. Naming them hence can be programmatic. ANA is one such app. And there is also room for personal expression for those who feel that the names should have a human touch. At Portqii, we often use GIFs in our emails, and we type in the name of the main character into the filename, be it Homer Simpson or Tyler Durden.
The Challenge #
The biggest hurdle to maintaining a naming convention, is the not coming up with the conventions, but to get everyone in the team following the conventions.
Even if we manage to effectively communicate the business rules of naming assets to each person, including the new team members – at the time of asset creation, they could either forget, or postpone naming it right. Coming up with a name that is right in all aspects take time, and most, people don’t want to spend that time, and would rather get on with the work. And, who would blame them, because what they are jumping into is more important than naming the asset.
The Solution #
At Portqii, we thought we could help. So we made ANA. An App to do the mundane part of coming up with a name that checks all the boxes – and the users could add a personal touch to name with their expressions.
The Asset Naming Assistant application allows marketers to apply names to a Marketo asset based on the naming conventions and categories defined by the Business.
The application provides the following capabilities:
- Select the asset types that the business rules will apply to
- Add Business Categories that will be applied to the names
- Choose between a pick-list, text value, and date
- Set the order in which the business categories will appear on the name
- Choose whether that category is a required value to name an asset
- Set Business Rules for the following:
- Link Marketo assets to Business Categories and choose which Business Categories get displayed on which Marketo asset
- Set a separator type value to determine which character separates the different Business Category values in the name of a Marketo asset.
- Choose whether to append a date timestamp (in Epoch Timestamp format) to a name of an asset
- Allow end users to fill out a form from within the asset. The application will save the asset with the new name.
Benefits #
With good asset names, team members get to the assets easily. The auto-fill suggestions make more sense, searching gets easier, the names themselves start making more sense.
Apart from the names, ANA also allows adding #hashtags to each asset. There is no limit to how many #tags we can add to an asset. Searching for an asset becomes easier when we know the tags that are attached to an asset.
Not only can we create new assets with our business rules, we can also rename older assets.
