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I am a bit confused on how File Location(for Enhanced FTP) works in Marketing cloud. My understanding is:

1) We have 1 space provided for our Marketing cloud instance(account) and we call it as Enhanced FTP location?

2) Let's say we have 10 Business Units in our account, each BU will have same URL and Port number(that would mean the space is one). We create FTP user to access that location for each BU. To divide the space, the username of that FTP user will be the account MID(does this mean that when the user access the FTP location using his credentials, he will only see BU specific files, i.e., the files that were exported or imported from his BU)? I referred to this FTP Users, it states that " This section includes information for all users associated with the Marketing Cloud FTP account:

FTP Username: Primary identifier for the user accessing the FTP account Status: Status of the FTP user Password Expiration Date: Date when the user’s current password expires The displayed information contains only users associated with the specified MID. For Enterprise 2.0 accounts, the displayed information shows only users associated with the specified IDs and not any associated business units."

The last line confuses me more every time I read it.

3) The above link also says that "Use FTP accounts to assign FTP privileges to users in your Marketing Cloud account. Marketing Cloud allows one FTP user per MID.". Now if I have 2 users in 1 BU to whom I need to provide separate space to import/export their files such that they can access only their files/folders. Is this possible?

Kindly, let me know how this works. Thanks!

2 Answers 2

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SFMC documentation is a bit confusing on these topics..

There is a separate FTP space provided for each BU, the login name is always the BU MID. So if you have primary BU and 10 child-BU's, you'll have a total of 11 FTP accounts you can access. It's not related to any of the SFMC users.

Unfortunately what you ask in your 3rd point is not possible, there is only one login per BU, it is not possible to create separate logins for different people. This one login is to be shared between all users in that specific BU that need to access it.

You can, of course, create their own folders in the FTP, but that doesn't mean they can't take a peek at each others folders and files.

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  • Thank You for the explanation Rain!
    – Krati Garg
    Mar 7, 2019 at 13:00
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    Just to add, we can have the support team configure and share the FTP locations within multiple BUs. So, let's say we need to share assets within three child BUs or Parent and child BUs, we can ask the support team to make the three FTP space as one and they can configure it for us(as confirmed by Salesforce Support team).
    – Krati Garg
    Mar 8, 2019 at 10:05
  • Awesome, glad to hear they have this option now.
    – Rain
    Mar 8, 2019 at 10:13
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A workaround is to use an external SFTP as a file location. This will allow you to add multiple folders and accounts to a signle BU.

Check out the SFMC help: link

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  • We came across an unfortunate limitation to this: external locations don't allow folder structures. This means that for each folder on your FTP you would need an external file location with an associated user routed directly to this folder as you can't access subfolders from Marketing Cloud. It's not a showstopper if you have full administrative control of your FTP but certainly makes it cumbersome to implement. Mar 7, 2019 at 18:46

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