# Activate a message template
<a name="activate-message-templates"></a>

To help you manage the development and use of individual message templates, Connect Customer supports versioning for all types of message templates. Versioning provides a way for you to create a history of changes to a template—each version is a snapshot of a template at a certain point in time. Versioning also provides a way for you to control the contents and settings of messages that use a template.

You can only activate message templates that have been **Saved as new version**. This is to prevent accidentally activating templates that are drafts.

When a template version is **Activated**, it is available to be added to the [Flow block in Connect Customer: Send message](send-message.md) and may be available to agents through the agent workspace.

**To activate a messaging template**

Log in to Connect Customer admin website with an Admin account or a user account that has **Content Management** - **Message templates** - **Create** in it's security profile. 

1. On the left navigation menu, choose **Message templates**.

1. On the **Message templates** page, save the template using the **Save as new version** option.

1. On the **Messaging templates** page re-open the template you just saved.

1. Use the dropdown menu to choose the version of the template to activate.  
![The Version number for a template.](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/connect/latest/adminguide/images/message-template-version.png)

1. Choose **Activate**.  
![The Activate button on the message template page.](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/connect/latest/adminguide/images/message-template-version-activate.png)