Last Updated on March 23, 2022 by Rakesh Gupta

While working on Salesforce projects we often face many challenges that can slow us down. A few of them are listed below:

1. No data in sandbox for end user to test the new feature
2. How to keep every sandbox in sync
3. Easiest way to take the backup of data or metadata in version control system like (Github, BitBucket or Azure Cloud)
4. Quick way to compare metadata between orgs before deployment
5. Quickest way to deploy changes to multiple orgs
6. And much more

Sometimes few solve such challenges using manual approach or writing script, where we spend our precious time. How about having a tool that makes our life easier?

Let me introduce Prodly AppOps, a next-gen DevOps for Salesforce suite that brings Administrators, developers and Operations users together to rapidly develop and deliver Features or User stories following that Salesforce best practices methodology. The AppOps approach enables teams to collaborate and accelerate the development-to-deployment process while continuing to reduce risk and change failure rate. It will help you in the following ways:

• Quality by preventing errors
• Security by applying governance and auditability to changes
• Reliability by allowing business users to participate in the release process with guardrails
• Save time by seeding data in Sandbox
• Increase sandbox usage without conflicts

In this article, I will show you how you can use Prodly for Data Seeding and quick deployment (including metadata comparison).

Sandbox Seeding

Data seeding, or sandbox seeding, is the technique of populating a Salesforce org with records from Production. Data seeding also applies to other types of Salesforce orgs, such as Developer orgs and scratch orgs, and there are even times where you need to move data back to Production.

Now I am going to seed the data to developer Sandbox (dev1) from Production.

1. Navigate on AppOps Release | Seed Sandbox
2. Select PROD as Source and Dev1 as Destination
3. You can now use the existing deployment plan, which is equivalent to the Salesforce Sandbox template that allows you to select the object whose data you can copy.
4. It also allows you to filter your data using a SOQL query.
5. AppOps also provides the options to simulate before deployment, which is helpful if you want to get an idea of how many records are going to copy to another environment as a part of data seeding.
6. In the end, it will show you the deployment summary with detailed results.

Seeding production records for 18 related objects would take hours to do manually, but with Prodly it only took minutes to seed up to 5 orgs simultaneously. It’s also repeatable every time I need to seed test data into an environment. Now you get a sense of how much time you and your team members can save by using Prodly Sandbox seeding feature. Don’t worry it also provides obfuscation options for protecting sensitive data.

With Prodly AppOps’ version control option, you can also use the above approach to initiate a rollback deployment to restore the data in a Salesforce Org to any prior version.

Metadata Deployment

When it’s comes to deploy metadata, many customers still use classical deployment method i.e. Change Set and refresh.

Compare Metadata

Not having a feature to compare the metadata before deployment is a key feature that the Salesforce change set doesn’t support. With Prodly it is possible to compare Source and Destination org’s selected metadata side-by-side. It’s not always possible to refresh a sandbox when you need to, but with Prodly that’s not a problem. You can quickly see what’s different and move metadata changes between any orgs so they match again.

Deploy Metadata – Salesforce Flow

Many of you’ve deployed Salesforce Flow to Production. The last step of Flow deployment is to manually activate the Flow in Production. The good news is that Prodly AppOps has a feature that auto-activates the Flow after deployment without any manual intervention.

Conclusion

To be successful, you need to have a tool that makes your life easier when it comes to deployment, rollback including sandbox seeding.

Schedule a demo to discover how AppOps can improve how your team manages data in Salesforce.

Formative Assessment:

I want to hear from you!

What is one thing you learned from this post? How do you envision applying this new knowledge in the real world? Feel free to share in the comments below.