Tag Archives: salesforce hotfix

Skyrocket salesforce data deployment with Prodly AppOps

Skyrocket Salesforce Data Deployment With Prodly

Discover a Better Alternative to the Salesforce Status Quo

Skyrocket salesforce data deployment with Prodly AppOps

Salesforce is a comprehensive platform to manage your marketing, sales, and customer support processes. But when it comes to change management, traditional Salesforce data deployment tools have their drawbacks. And those drawbacks can threaten your business progress. 

Perhaps you’re thinking, “But we’ve always done it this way. Why should we change?” The answer is simple: To streamline and ramp up your change management process.

Current Salesforce Data Deployment Tools Are Problematic

Just think about it: How many times have you had to delay adding a new feature or flow due to issues with Data Loader or change sets? These tools might be free, but they’re also labor intensive, error prone, and time consuming. So if you want to use them for a time-sensitive project, you’ll need to add headcount to meet your deadline. 

Of course, developers are known for their ingenuity, and many write their own scripts for promoting data through the release chain. This can certainly save them hours on an individual data migration project. 

But the time investment needed to initially write the script and subsequently maintain it can be considerable—and take them away from their core work. Not to mention, every script is unique. That can create problems when syncing all the changes in a shared sandbox, leading to hours of troubleshooting. Is this really the best use of developers’ time?

Alternatively, you can use a Full Copy sandbox to recreate your production org. However, that’s often cost prohibitive. Plus, a Full Copy sandbox doesn’t refresh frequently enough to be an actual reproduction of your production environment. The resulting data degradation can even have a negative effect on the project.

The final option is to outsource your projects—but that’s expensive. Moreover, contractors don’t have the knowledge of your business that your own team has. This can result in errors and delays. On top of that, if you need to change or fix something after the contractor has delivered the work, it can rack up additional costs. 

Accelerate Salesforce Data Deployment With Prodly

Fortunately, there’s a better way to do things. Our low-code Prodly DevOps suite automates Salesforce data deployment while maintaining complex relationships. Thanks to its top-notch automation, it offers significant time savings.

In fact, it reduces data migration time by 85 percent and is 12 times faster than change sets. On top of that, it eliminates the need to write and maintain custom scripts. This results in significantly faster, 100% accurate release processes that can be managed by both declarative and programmatic users. 

Our solution lets you rapidly move data up and down the pipeline, as well as to parallel orgs. You can use either the production environment or a VCS as the source of truth. 

For metadata deployments, Prodly provides automatic duplicate prevention. It also provides versioning and conflict resolution with a rollback feature.  

When it comes to metadata migration and deployments, the Prodly DevOps suite allows you to visually compare orgs. You can also leverage the subcomponent drill-down point-and-click feature.

Check out this table to see how Prodly outperforms Data Loader, change sets, and custom scripts.

Prodly AppOps vs change sets, dataloader, and custom scripts

Drive Your Business Forward with Prodly DevOps

With the powerful Salesforce data deployment tools Prodly provides, you can keep your projects on track and significantly ramp up velocity. 

You can save literally hundreds of employee hours on frustrating, headache-inducing manual labor—and let your team get right down to what they do best. As a value add, you can unburden your employees and increase their job satisfaction, which in turn improves retention. 

Combined, these factors will make your organization more agile—and help propel your business forward.  

Get in touch

An abstract representation of a hotfix.

Improve Your Salesforce Hotfix Strategy

Many devs and admins who follow governance and release best practices find making a Salesforce hotfix challenging.  If you struggle to configure and deploy hotfixes in a timely manner, you’re not alone. And when it comes to creating a hotfix environment in Salesforce, traditional data set building is slow, laborious, and prone to error—even with Data Loader.

But as Victoria Livschitz said, “It’s not the prevention of bugs but the recovery—the ability to gracefully exterminate them—that counts.” 

And that’s exactly what Prodly allows you to do. 

Prodly lets you automate your hotfix strategy and rapidly fix, test, and promote essential changes to production. In this blog post, we’ll examine what hotfixes are, how not to handle them, and four ways Prodly improves your hotfix strategy.

What Is a Salesforce Hotfix?

In Salesforce, a hotfix is a simple configuration change that addresses a key issue impacting day to day business. Oftentimes, one is required due to a bug a user reports—so you need to fix it immediately.

Although a hotfix may not involve a major change to your production environment, it’s business critical and therefore urgent. Because it addresses a bug that’s adversely affecting your business operations, it can’t be postponed until your next major release.

That’s why you need the ability to implement a patch as efficiently as possible without getting bogged down in error-prone manual processes.

Salesforce Hotfix Workflow: Inefficient and Costly

If you’re implementing a hotfix in Salesforce, the process probably looks something like this:

  1. Purchase a Partial Copy sandbox or Full Copy sandbox to use as a hotfix environment—at 20 percent or 30 percent of net spend.
  2. In this environment, determine what’s causing the issue. Then fix the issue and test it.
  3. Use change sets to promote the approved change to your production org. That involves creating an outbound change set in the hotfix environment and an inbound change set in the prod org. Then you have to validate the inbound change set and deploy the change set. 
  4. Migrate (either manually or with Data Loader) any configuration data required for the hotfix.
  5. Use change sets to promote the change to your Developer sandboxes and the Full sandbox you use for training.

Unfortunately, this strategy can be cost-prohibitive due to the expense of purchasing a sandbox to use as a dedicated hotfix environment. Moreover, the multiple manual steps required for each change set deployment make this process highly labor intensive and time consuming. 

Never Make a Patch Directly in Production!

Knowing how expensive and inefficient it is to implement a hotfix in Salesforce, you might be tempted to rush things and make the hotfix directly in production. 

A word to the wise, however:

Never, ever, make a hotfix directly in your prod org!

Why? Because if the hotfix introduces any new issues, you’ll be stuck with a much bigger headache. And that could affect your CX even more!

Create a Prod Hotfix Strategy Before the Next Bug

To be prepared to make a mission-critical change in a timely manner, don’t wait until a serious issue arises to design a hotfix workflow. Instead, get ahead of things and establish a production hotfix strategy before the next bug occurs. Your strategy should:

  • Appoint team members to configure the hotfix
  • Designate an environment where you’ll make the change and test the fix
  • Specify how you’ll promote the fix into production
  • Determine which other orgs will need the fix and how you’ll back promote the fix
  • Include a post mortem to analyze the event and prevent future issues

4 Ways Prodly Can Improve Your Hotfix Strategy

Now you have a basic game plan for dealing with hotfixes, let’s take a look at how Prodly can improve your strategy.

1. Use a Free Environment for Dedicated Production Support

With Prodly Sandbox Management, you don’t need to purchase a new Partial Copy or Full Copy sandbox as a dedicated hotfix environment. You can simply use a free Developer sandbox or Scratch org, because Prodly lets you easily and quickly move data into it. This saves your Partial Copy and Full Copy sandboxes for higher value projects in Salesforce.

2. Seed the Impacted Configuration to Your Hotfix Environment 

Your hotfix environment needs to be a reproduction of your production org. However, you don’t have time to recreate all the data from the prod org in the sandbox. 

In Prodly, you can compare your orgs to see any metadata differences between your prod org and your hotfix environment. If there are differences that will impact the patch, you can easily review and sync them to your hotfix environment. 

You can use sandbox seeding to automatically migrate the affected data to the hotfix environment. The sandbox seeding wizard allows you to quickly select data and upsert it to your hotfix environment.

Simply select a root object in your prod org, along with any related objects. Next, temporarily deactivate all events for the duration of the deployment to avoid complications. Finally, implement the deployment.

Note that Prodly provides prebuilt templates for common data seeding needs that can save you even more time.

3. Promote the Hotfix Back to Production

With your hotfix environment set up, you can determine what the problem is, configure the required change, and test the change without any risk to your prod org. Once you’re satisfied the change works, Prodly makes it easy to seamlessly move the change back into your production org—regardless of whether the fix involves metadata or data.

You also don’t have to use change sets and Data Loader to manually push the change to your prod org. You can leverage Prodly to automatically migrate the metadata and data while still maintaining complex object relationships. Simply select the configurations you want to deploy, and then deploy all the metadata and data changes at once.

4. Sync the Salesforce Hotfix to the Rest of the Orgs in Your Stack

While you’ve been rushing to fix the bug, your teammates may have been working on the next release. It’s essential to sync the rest of the orgs in the release path with your production org and training environment so they don’t reintroduce the bug or cause new ones. 

Prodly allows you to sync data to up to five orgs simultaneously. So once you’ve promoted the patch back to production, you can quickly and easily sync the metadata and data changes from production to the other orgs in the stack. The benefit is that by doing this, you’ll bring your other sandboxes up to date without having to wait to refresh them

An abstract representation of a hotfix.

Salesforce Hotfixes Are Easy With Prodly

Let’s face it: Bugs happen. 

And when they impact your day-to-day business operations, you need to fix them—fast. With a robust hotfix strategy and Prodly, you can quickly, efficiently, and easily create a hotfix environment, fix the issue, and promote the change to your production environment and other orgs. And you can do all this without the high costs of purchasing an additional Partial Copy or Full Copy sandbox in Salesforce.

 

To learn more about Prodly DevOps, contact us today.