Tag Archives: sandbox management

Abstract image of data replication representing sandbox management automation for Salesforce

13 Signs You Need Sandbox Management Automation for Salesforce

Solve These Problems—and More—With Automation for Salesforce Sandbox Management!

Without sandbox management automation for Salesforce, your release process is highly inefficient—and costly. In this blog, we list 13 signs you need automatic sandbox management. We also explain how it can empower your business and what benefits it offers.

13 Signs You Need Automatic Salesforce Sandbox Management

Abstract image of data replication representing sandbox management automation for Salesforce

Manual sandbox management—or worse, no environment management at all—can be the root of many problems throughout every level of your business. 

Developers keep overwriting each other’s work because they’re working in the same org. The sales team is frustrated because they have to wait too long for changes. And the executives are unhappy with the low performance and productivity.

Sound familiar? And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Check out these 13 signs you need sandbox management automation for Salesforce:

  1. Your C-suite is unhappy because the company isn’t achieving its goals. 
  2. Your sales team isn’t hitting its targets because you can’t deliver the changes they need on time.
  3. You’re spending too much time and resources on a slow, labor-intensive CPQ release process.
  4. You need another Full Copy, Partial Copy, or Developer Pro sandbox—but you can’t validate the expense.
  5. You regularly delay releases—or worse, miss deadlines altogether—due to an inefficient sandbox management strategy.
  6. You dread your weekly one-on-one meetings with your supervisor because your productivity isn’t up to speed.
  7. You never get enough done in a sprint because you waste too much time on non-development work like setting up sandboxes.
  8. You’ve lost count of the number of hours you’ve lost redoing work because another developer sharing the same sandbox overwrote your configurations.
  9. It’s time consuming and difficult to manage access to environments and mask data.
  10. The data in your development environment looks nothing like your production data, which causes issues further on in the release process.
  11. Your testing is subpar because you don’t have the time to create high-quality sample data for your test environments.
  12. You regularly fail to find bugs early in the release pipeline, making them much more expensive to fix later.
  13. You’re constantly having issues with conflict detection and resolution, which gets in the way of deployments.

Considering how much these problems are slowing you and the business down, wouldn’t you like to have a simple solution?

Empower Your Business With Sandbox Management Automation for Salesforce

With sandbox management automation for Salesforce, these issues are a thing of the past. For example, did you know sandbox management delivers direct cost savings?

How? Its sandbox seeding feature lets you turn Developer sandboxes and scratch orgs into production-grade environments! This eliminates the need to buy an additional Full Copy sandbox, Partial Copy sandbox, or Developer Pro sandbox.

Sandbox management automation also delivers indirect cost savings because it streamlines and accelerates the release process. It minimizes the time wasted on non-development work. And because you no longer have to wait on a sandbox refresh, it keeps your Salesforce team productive at all times.

In addition, Salesforce sandbox management automation enhances performance and productivity more than manual processes ever could. This helps drive revenue because it increases velocity significantly. 

Benefits of Automated Sandbox Management in Salesforce

Now you know how the big picture of how sandbox management empowers your business, check out how it solves your day-to-day headaches:

  1. Don’t waste your budget on an expensive Full Copy or Partial Copy sandbox. You can create the exact configurations you need in a lower-level org!
  2. Save time and money on setting up development environments, creating test records, and moving the sample data into the org. Are you a developer who uses Apex scripts to generate test data? Save time and energy on maintaining the scripts, because you don’t need them anymore.
  3. Increase the quality of the work by using data that’s identical to the data in your production environment.
  4. Enhance the quality of your testing with a shift-left approach by testing more frequently from the earliest stages of the development process. 
  5. Cut back on time and costs by catching bugs earlier on in the release process, when they’re easier and more affordable to fix. 
  6. Give everyone on the team their own development environment, and minimize the risk of losing work.
  7. Quickly and easily compare orgs to detect metadata differences. Solve any conflicts before they become an issue during deployment.
  8. Get more done in every sprint because you’re not wasting hours on non-development work.
  9. Meet all your deadlines because you minimize issues and bottlenecks.
  10. Empower your business users with the changes they need—when they need them.

The Best Sandbox Management Tool for Salesforce

Prodly Sandbox Management is the premier environment management solution on the market—and it’s powerful enough for Salesforce CPQ. You can automatically set up, compare, and sync environments in just a few clicks—all from a user-friendly, centralized UI. 

With sensitive data masking capabilities and full control over who can access each environment, you can easily ensure data security. Plus, with our diff view, you can compare the metadata differences between environments at a glance. This allows you to resolve any issues before deployment.

Our sandbox seeding automation provides instant data replication into up to five environments at the same time. And with our 1-click scratch org feature, you can set up production-grade environments—in a flash!

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FAQs

What is sandbox management in Salesforce?

Salesforce sandbox management is a set of processes you use to set up, manage, compare, and sync orgs to optimize the environments in your pipeline. When properly implemented, these processes enhance efficiency and reduce risk.

What is Salesforce sandbox management automation?

Automated sandbox management for Salesforce is software that eliminates the repetitive manual work involved with setting up, managing, comparing, and syncing environments. This state-of-the-art technology facilitates a faster, more reliable, and more secure release process—especially when combined with a DevOps approach.

Save money on Salesforce sandbox pricing represented by a VR image of a businessman and the words "cost control"

Save Money On Salesforce Sandbox Pricing: 5 Tips

How to Save Money on Salesforce Sandboxes!

Salesforce sandbox pricing can be expensive, but there are ways to save on it. And that’s with a robust Salesforce sandbox management tool like Prodly.

In this blog, we discuss five ways you can drastically reduce your spend on Full Copy, Partial Copy, and Developer Pro sandboxes by using Prodly.

Save on Salesforce Sandbox Pricing With Prodly Sandbox Management

Save money on Salesforce sandbox pricing represented by a VR image of a businessman and the words "cost control"

Prodly Sandbox Management helps you save money on Salesforce sandbox pricing in the following five ways:

  1. Stop buying Full Copy, Partial Copy, and Dev Pro sandboxes to get development environments that look like production. You don’t have to spend five, 20, or 30 percent of your net spend on development orgs. With Prodly Sandbox Management, you can instantly replicate the exact part of prod required for development in lower-level orgs. Maximize every free developer and scratch org at your disposal by populating them with precisely the metadata and data you need. 
  2. Stop wasting time and money on non-development work. You don’t have to exhaust developer productivity on environment builds when you can’t afford Salesforce sandbox pricing for Full Copy, Partial Copy, or Dev Pro orgs. Nor do you have to spend hours generating data or deploying data and metadata between orgs to sync them. With Prodly Sandbox Management, you can use sandbox seeding to automatically create scratch orgs with instant data replication. Even better: You can do this in just a few clicks. Plus, you can effortlessly deploy data, metadata, and even complex data models between orgs. This gives you more time to focus on higher value work—and on getting that work done faster.
  3. Avoid issues late in the development process when they’re the most expensive to address. Eighty-five percent of bugs are introduced during development. And if you don’t catch them until later in the pipeline, they can end up costing 30 times more time and money to fix. Use Prodly Sandbox Management to replicate parts of your production org early in the development process. This results in fewer costly problems later on in the pipeline.
  4. Avoid potential loss of revenue resulting from downtime and errors. Don’t be limited by Salesforce sandbox refresh constraints that impact the quality of the data in your environments! Use Prodly to automatically sync orgs as often as you like to ensure consistency throughout your release pipeline—even on a schedule. This results in higher-quality changes, which minimizes bugs and downtime that can impact your end users.
  5. Avoid loss of productivity during sandbox refreshes. Salesforce sandbox refreshes can take a long time—and during this time, you can’t do any work in the org. Prodly Sandbox Management lets you effortlessly and quickly sync all your environments without having to do a refresh—so you can keep moving forward. And when refreshes are unavoidable, rest assured Prodly can help you lift and shift to another org—without missing a beat. 

Clearly, with Prodly environment management, you can minimize your spend on Salesforce sandbox subscriptions. You can also eliminate spend on activities that don’t add value and reduce the impact of bugs on the development process.

On top of that, you can maximize the uptime of your production org and keep your development team productive at all times. This  accelerates the delivery of new features—and empowers your end users.

So why waste your valuable budget on Salesforce sandbox pricing when you can save money with Prodly Sandbox Management?

FAQ

How much does a Full sandbox cost in Salesforce?

A Full Copy sandbox costs 30 percent of your net spend on your Salesforce license. For this money, you get a complete replica of your production org with all the customer data and metadata. 

Note that a Full sandbox is only an accurate copy for a very short period of time. As soon as any activity takes place in your production environment, the sandbox isn’t the exact same anymore. 

You can only bring it into a true duplicate state by refreshing it. However, you can only refresh a sandbox once every 29 days at most. That means the value of your Full Copy sandbox degrades gradually over the course of time until you refresh it. Then the same process starts over again.

Why do Salesforce sandboxes cost so much?

Sandbox prices in Salesforce can be steep. Of course, the value of Full sandboxes, as well as Partial sandboxes, lies in the fact that they provide you with an initially exact copy of all or part of your production org. 

Working in an environment that looks like prod is critical to the quality of your changes and the speed of your release management process. For this reason, companies are willing to pay a premium for these types of sandboxes. 

However, in the earlier stages of development, you don’t really need to replicate all of prod—just the sections required to perform the work you’re doing. That’s why Prodly offers sandbox management as an alternative to Full Copy, Partial Copy, and Developer Pro sandboxes. 

This option is much more affordable than dealing with Salesforce pricing. In addition, when used in conjunction with a solid sandbox management strategy, it enhances the velocity and quality of your change management process. Learn more about sandbox management.

Diverse Salesforce team learning how to do CI/CD without version control

How to Do CI/CD Without Version Control

You Don’t Always Need Git for Salesforce DevOps!

If you aren’t yet ready for source-driven development in Salesforce, it’s possible to do continuous integration and continuous delivery, or CI/CD, without version control. We’ll discuss how to do this and why you might want to. We’ll also explain that you can also find your own balance between no automation and source-driven development.

How to Do CI/CD Without a VCS in Salesforce

Diverse Salesforce team learning how to do CI/CD without version control

Although many developer-centric Salesforce teams are accustomed to using a version control system (VCS) for CI/CD, it’s not an absolute must-have. You can still achieve the benefits of CI/CD in Salesforce without Git.

Continuous Integration With Sandbox Management

To establish continuous integration in Salesforce without version control, start with a best-in-class sandbox management strategy to keep your orgs clean. Then, during the development process, you continually sync configuration changes that have passed integration testing into your developer environments. You do this by pinpointing the changes within the configurations in your integration environment and pushing them back to your Developer sandboxes and scratch orgs. 

This ensures your lower-level dev environments are always up to date, which in turn minimizes the chances of bugs and release delays. 

With a solution like Prodly Sandbox Management, you can easily manage data and metadata across every environment in your release path without using a Git repository. This is especially helpful for admins and other low-code/no-code users.

Continuous Delivery With Automated Deployments

Now you have up-to-date developer orgs, it’s time to automate deployments to ensure continuous delivery. The benefits of automating deployments include speed, accuracy, a reduced workload, and a whole lot less frustration.  

Using Prodly DevOps, you can bypass data loaders and change sets, and instead, deploy your changes automatically. Prodly DevOps provides easy diff-viewing and pre-built automations for a large number of Salesforce apps, including Salesforce CPQ, Conga Composer, FinancialForce, and more. 

What’s more: You can even schedule deployments so they occur after hours, when they won’t disrupt your business users.

Why Do CI/CD Without Source Control?

One reason to do CI/CD without Git in Salesforce DevOps is that a source-driven development process takes time and effort to set up. You’ll also have to organize training and enablement on a completely new process for your team. Additionally, you have to use the exact same release path every time, which can compromise your agility, especially when it comes to small fixes.

The initial overhead of implementing source-driven development combined with the loss of flexibility often outweighs the benefits gained. Because of this, smaller teams rarely find the upfront investment of setting up a version control system for Salesforce DevOps worth the return.

Find the Right Balance Between No Automation and Source-Driven Development

When it comes to deciding between no automation for release management and source-driven development, it’s important to realize that the Goldilocks principle applies. This means that there’s no predetermined “right” or “wrong” balance between the two. What works for your Salesforce instance might be completely different from what works for another company. 

For example, let’s say you can achieve 90 percent of the efficiency gains of CI/CD with automated deployments. If you add version control, it might give you the other 10 percent—but it would likely require an inordinate amount of effort to set it up. In other words, it’s important to weigh the pros and cons of using a VCS and decide on a course of action that will yield the greatest ROI for your specific company.

CI/CD With Prodly DevOps

Although source-driven development offers additional automation for Salesforce DevOps, you can achieve comparable results using Prodly DevOps.

Interested in learning more? Request a demo today!

FAQs

What is a VCS?

A version control system or VCS is a tool that makes tracking and managing changes to code and configuration easier. By using a VCS, you can ensure you’re always working on the latest version of the configuration. Learn more about version control for Salesforce. 

 

What are the most popular version control systems for Salesforce DevOps?

The most popular version control systems for Salesforce DevOps include GitHub, Bitbucket, Azure, and GitLab.

 

What is continuous integration for Salesforce?

Continuous integration for Salesforce is the practice of keeping Salesforce development environments in sync with production. It also involves syncing in-flight development work to identify and fix integration issues as early as possible in the development cycle. 

In a best-in-class Salesforce development process, changes to data and metadata are continuously integrated across parallel development paths. This way, everyone’s working against the most current configuration of Salesforce.

 

What is continuous delivery for Salesforce?

Continuous delivery for Salesforce is the practice of automating the delivery of changes to end users in production. A best-in-class Salesforce development process involves making and testing changes in a development environment, i.e. a Developer sandbox or scratch org.

After you’ve approved the changes, you use automation to deploy them through a release path of increasingly production-like orgs. These can include integration, UAT, and staging phases. The ultimate goal is to deliver thoroughly tested work to end-users. 

By using automation, continuous delivery for Salesforce accelerates the release cycle and reduces the risk of deployment errors.

Screenshot of data masking in Prodly's sandbox seeding

7 Benefits of Sandbox Seeding in Salesforce

Here at Prodly, we know that data seeding in Salesforce is the beginning of any Salesforce DevOps process. Here are seven benefits of sandbox seeding that will help you maximize your ROI from Salesforce.

1. Selectively Update Full Copy and Partial Copy Sandboxes in Salesforce With Fresh Data and Metadata—on Your Own Time.

Full Copy and Partial Copy sandboxes quickly lose their value as the last QA or UAT stop on the release train. Why? Because your production environment keeps changing, so a Full or Partial Copy sandbox consistently becomes less of a reproduction.

Sandbox seeding in Salesforce lets you update your orgs piecemeal to keep them in sync with production. That way, you don’t have to overhaul each sandbox every time you want to refresh. 

With traditional Salesforce sandbox refresh requirements, refreshes are almost never convenient. The ability to do mini-refreshes significantly enhances your release process. As a result,  you can more effectively utilize higher-level environments to drive your release process. 

 

2. Move Faster—and Streamline Your Release Process

How often have you spent hours generating sample Account records and other Custom Object records one by one? Only to later run into problems because the data isn’t representative of your production environment?

With Prodly’s sandbox seeding, it’s easy to provision sandboxes in Salesforce. You can quickly select Objects to seed to up to five environments in one go. That means you can create five development-ready environments in just one click!

Selecting deployment data to seed to a sandbox with Prodly.

Prodly also provides prebuilt automation templates. They let you quickly seed an org with commonly-used Objects. And they even preserve complex data relationships in the process.

3. Unlock the Potential of Developer and DevPro Sandboxes in Salesforce, as Well as Scratch Orgs

Sandbox seeding lets you maximize your Developer and Developer Pro sandboxes, as well as your scratch orgs, as true development environments.

Your lower-level org should function as a ready-made playground. It’s an environment where you can can tinker with your ideas before pushing any changes up the release pipeline. If you start your projects with data seeding in Salesforce, you can sync configuration changes across all your sandboxes. 

And you’ll never again face get confused and frustrated about your test working in your DevPro sandbox—but not in UAT.

4. Use Developer Sandboxes Like Full Copies

You can work in your Developer sandbox with all the data you need to move forward. At the same time, your team can still perform work in your Full Copy sandbox. Think about it: Do you really need 100,000 Account records to test with? Or will 100 be more than enough for unit testing?

Imagine being able to quickly populate your sandbox in Salesforce with real test data and get to work. It’s one less roadblock to deal with. This helps resuscitate any lagging business processes. It also ensures you can get new features to end users faster. And isn’t that what it’s all about?

5. Quickly Create a Hotfix Environment With Sandbox Seeding

Sometimes you need to quickly fix a bug in Salesforce that’s affecting a mission-critical business process. Of course, you shouldn’t try to do this in production.

Instead, use data seeding to quickly spin up a sandbox in Salesforce and populate it with the data you need to fix the issue. Use best practices for making hotfixes in Salesforce, and simply promote the patch back to production

6. Enhance Employee Satisfaction

Employees are happier when they don’t keep running into issues that slow them down and cause headaches. 

In fact, according to a Salesforce survey, 89 percent of full-time workers are more satisfied thanks to automation. Moreover, an astounding 91 percent agree that automation saves them time and gives them a better Salesforce work-life balance. 

By offering employees an automated sandbox seeding process, you can make their day-to-day lives much easier. And that leads to improved job satisfaction.

7. Improve Productivity in Salesforce

With happier employees and faster, more streamlined release pipelines, you can increase productivity by as much as 80 percent. 

That means you have more time to take care of the day-to-day business of managing your business. Plus, you can take on more projects and work through them more efficiently.

Sandbox Seeding in Salesforce Is Critical to DevOps in Salesforce

The key principles of DevOps are ship often, ship small, build in isolated environments, and automate deployments. 

To build in isolated environments, you need to maximize reproducible environments—in other words, your sandboxes and scratch orgs. So it’s key to have automated sandbox seeding capabilities like those provided by Prodly Sandbox Management. 

Our sandbox seeding wizard lets you quickly and easily spin up mini environments that look like your production org. What’s more: They won’t affect other environments where the rest of your team is working.

Obstacles to Data Seeding in Salesforce

Sandbox seeding obviously offers many benefits—plus, it’s critical to Salesforce DevOps. So why aren’t more Salesforce customers doing it?

Some Salesforce customers aren’t yet aware of the power of sandbox seeding automation. They do know that manually populating sandboxes and scratch orgs with valuable testing data from production takes a long time. This is especially true if you run into issues when migrating relational data—which you probably will using legacy Salesforce tools.

And when a process becomes time consuming, it adds unnecessary expense to the project.

In addition, using Data Loader for seeding can cause concerns about security.  Downloading data to a CSV before migrating it to the new environment isn’t secure and may violate security policies.

Features of Prodly’s Automated Sandbox Seeding

Prodly Sandbox Management automates the process of seeding your sandboxes in Salesforce with real-life test data—making it quick and easy. Here’s are some of the solution’s most important features:

Data Templates

We provide prebuilt templates of commonly used record types that let you move entire relational data schema at once. Easily move your entire Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Industries Cloud, or any other subset of your Salesforce schema. For example, migrate Accounts with all related Contacts, Opportunities, Quotes, and Cases with Case Comments and Attachments with a single click.

Screenshot of a diagram view of data template

Select Data on the Fly

For custom data seeding needs, Prodly Sandbox Management gives you a lightning-fast way to move Objects you want to seed. Simply select what you’re interested in, and the wizard automatically migrates the related data with it.

Data Masking

Sometimes, you have sensitive data you want to protect in lower-level orgs. Prodly Sandbox Management provides data masking to prevent unauthorized parties from seeing it. This helps ensure you’re in compliance with relevant privacy regulations and legislation.

Screenshot of data masking in Prodly's sandbox seeding

Ramp Up Your Release Management Process with Prodly

With Prodly to seed sandboxes in Salesforce orgs, you can minimize the upfront work on projects. In addition, you can ramp up your release management process. This one crucial step can give your team valuable hours back—and save your company significant resources. 

Perhaps you’re facing some flak for lagging returns. If so, consider sandbox seeding as a fundamental way to enhance your processes and get a stronger ROI from Salesforce. It’s a tool to keep your team agile and to improve time to value for the business.

Contact us to request a personalized demo!

The Value of Bidirectional Sandbox Seeding

In this blog, we explore what bidirectional sandbox seeding is and why you need it. We also look at the value of sandbox seeding with Prodly Sandbox Management, as well as why you should be seeding sandboxes in the first place.

What Is Bidirectional Sandbox Seeding?

Bidirectional sandbox seeding involves deploying data from your production org to a sandbox—and from your sandbox to another environment. You can do this with a freshly created org or during an environment refresh.

A photo of a desert with a traffic sign with arrows pointing in opposite directions representing bidirectional sandbox seeding

Why Do You Need Bidirectional Sandbox Seeding?

Bidirectional sandbox seeding allows you to create a fresh sandbox, deploy data to it, and then move data in any direction—up, down, and laterally. You can roll back changes to start all the way at the beginning, or you can change just one tiny detail. 

This makes for a much better auditability of changes in production and deployment results, resulting in better governance.

When you’re only able to work with partial data, the chance of bugs and errors slowing down your progress is immense. Many teams lose steam in the development and QA process when they go the route of manually working with a sandbox test data set. 

In contrast, bidirectional sandbox seeding gives control to anyone who can click through a data management workflow. 

The Value of Bidirectional Sandbox Seeding With Prodly

With the sandbox seeding feature in Prodly Sandbox Management, you have the ability to move data in both directions—with just a few clicks. This allows you to maximize your team’s efficiency, transform your entire workflow, and improve your end-user experience. 

By using this low-code option for DevOps, you’ll soon be handling change requests like clockwork. 

Improve Your Governance Strategy With Prodly

The seamless, automated process for seeding sandboxes Prodly provides enhances your governance strategy

It increases org health, fights errors, and improves efficiency tremendously. Here’s how:

Prodly Sandbox Management can help you move your data up, down, backward and forward between your production org and sandboxes. 

It gives you the power to migrate data from up to five orgs simultaneously. This eliminates the need to depend on a Full Copy sandbox to work from as you advance through changes. 

You can also configure data simulations, meaning that you can make changes without consequences. When you need to deploy complex data from a schema all at once, you don’t have to worry about complications anymore. 

Sandbox Seeding Without Prodly

Without the sandbox seeding feature in Prodly Sandbox Management, you’re literally left to your own devices having to use a barrage of tools to handle what Prodly does seamlessly. 

There’s the tedious process of using a data loader. The difficulty, duration, and mind-numbingness of the project can be compounded based on the size of your project. 

Some companies employ a third-party developer to manage their sandbox, which can become quite costly. 

In contrast, with Prodly, you can populate—and even anonymize— representative test data into as many as five orgs in just a matter of minutes. Prodly gives you more control of your data and processes, as well as a greater probability of aligning your team with the needs of your stakeholders for every project. 

Why Should I Seed Sandboxes?

There are several very good reasons to seed sandboxes. 

Without sandbox seeding, there’s a lack of representative production data in lower-level sandboxes that makes it harder to imagine, configure, and test changes. 

This problem becomes more complicated as changes move up the release pipeline and you need to keep all of the sandboxes in sync with production.  

However, sandbox seeding lets you provide everyone with their own development environment before they promote their changes to a shared QA org and ultimately production. This circumvents the problem of who’s doing what in a shared sandbox—plus, it reduces the odds of overwriting each other’s work.

It lets your team work faster and test more thoroughly. It also gives you more effective use of your expensive sandboxes.

In addition, when everyone has their own development environment with representative data, it’s much easier to find a good window of time to refresh your Full Copy or Partial Copy sandbox. And that in turn reduces the number of errors you encounter during the development process.

See Bidirectional Sandbox Seeding in Action!

Discover how easy and quick it is to seed sandboxes with Prodly Sandbox Management—watch the 25-minute webinar Ask a CSM: Bidirectional Sandbox Seeding.