Whether you are at an agency working with multiple clients or your company has their Marketing efforts split across multiple business units, you have likely encountered the challenge of only being able to be in 1 Salesforce instance or business unit at a time. This week’s trick is specifically to address this challenge.
The Tuesday Tip for Jan 14th is:
Utilize “Incognito Mode” on your browser to work in multiple Marketing Cloud instances at the same time.
Incognito Mode was designed to allow “privacy” while browsing the web. One of the side effects is that Incognito Mode does not look at any existing cookies. This means it can not see if you already have a Salesforce instance open. So with the use of an incognito browser you can login to Salesforce Marketing Cloud a second time – this works for multiple accounts or the same account and multiple business units.
This ability to have multiple instances open comes in handy if you are trying to compare setups from one unit to another or move from a DEV environment to a PROD one. For me, inevitably, I would be knee-deep in building something or debugging something, when I would get interrupted by someone asking if I could help them and/or look at something with them. Because this happened all the time, I’d even gotten into the habit of opening a 2nd instance of Salesforce at the beginning of my day.
Please note, because it can’t see your previous cookies, Salesforce will require that you re-verify your identity every time. So be prepared to dig that verification code out of your email.
Just like opening new tabs there are short hands for opening up incognito mode –
In Google Chrome, the easiest way to open an Incognito window is with the keyboard shortcut combination Ctrl-Shift-N (Windows) or Command-Shift-N (macOS). Another way is to click on the menu on the upper right — it’s three vertical dots — and select New Incognito Window from the list.
Firefox also has incognito mode – they call it “private browsing”. From the keyboard, a private browsing session can be called up using the combination Ctrl-Shift-P (Windows) or Command-Shift-P (macOS). Alternately, a private window will open from the menu at the upper right of Firefox — three short horizontal lines — after selecting New Private Window.
Chrome may get more attention for its Incognito mode than any other browser, but fun fact Apple’s Safari was actually the first browser to adopt the idea of private browsing. To open what Safari calls a Private Window on a Mac, users can do a three-key combination of Command-Shift-N, the same shortcut Chrome adopted. Otherwise, a window can be called up by selecting the File menu and clicking on New Private Window.