Some of you may have gotten an email that read the following:

At Salesforce, Trust is our #1 value and nothing is more important than the success of our customers. You are receiving this notification because our records indicate that you are a Marketing Cloud admin of EID with multiple enterprise level data extensions that are not part of the Shared Data Extensions Folder.

To avoid disruption to your service (email sending), move any data extensions that must be accessible across business units to the Shared Data Extensions folder by February 7, 2020.

You can see the full content of this email here.

 

What does this mean to you?

 

If you have an Enterprise 2.0 edition of Marketing Cloud (easiest way to tell is if you have a Shared Items folder in your account) then you should really pay attention to this.

 

Basically starting in February 7 any Data Extensions that you have in the parent account and they are accessed from any child business units will only be accessible by business units if they are part of the Shared Data Extensions Folder. Meaning, you will have to move these DEs to the Shared Items folder for them to be accessible from a child BU.

 

This measure is put in place in an effort to have marketers enhance the security permissions and give more control to the access each user and business unit has to Data.

 

What’s the impact of this change?

 

If you have Queries, AMPScript or Serverside JavaScript in a child BU referencing a DE in the parent account, you need to move these Data Extensions to the Shared Items folder and add the ENT. prefix to the name of the DE.

 

Examples of where AMPScript or SSJS can be present include Emails, Content Areas, Exclusion Scripts or Script Activities in Automation Studio.

 

Some of the functions that perform operations with Data Extensions include Lookup, LookupRows, UpsertData, DeleteData among others.

 

Example Scenario

 

Say that you have some AMPScript in an email in a Child BU that looks up a DE in the Parent folder:

%%[Lookup("DEinParent","Name","State","OH")]%%

After February 7, if you move the Data Extension to the Shared Items folder, you need to make the following update to your code:

%%[Lookup("ENT.DEinParent","Name","State","OH")]%%

Here’s a graphic that can help you understand the situation a bit more:

 

 

The same situation will happen with Query activities.

 

What should you do next?

 

If you have a suspicion that you are falling in this scenario, the immediate next step is to log a case with the topic #AmpScriptDESharingAssistance. Support can give you more information about the Data Extensions that are being referenced in content or queries and should be moved.

 

If you need a list of which content areas, queries etc. use these Data Extensions, Salesforce support indicated you will need a Custom Data Extract for this

 

After you have this information, the best course of action is to determine a plan to migrate such DEs or create new DEs, move the data over and update your scripting so your subscribers are not affected by the change.

 

I hope you find this useful, please don’t hesitate in reaching out to us with any questions or in case you need help dealing with this situation.