Salesforce is best known for its customer relationship management (CRM) service that uses Salesforce deployment tools. It is arguably the most innovative company in the US,that has made steps to ensure that customer relations between companies and their clients are smooth through tools of deployment.
In this article, I will analyze all the Salesforce deployment tools and find out what best suits you for your enterprise. Of course later on with the conception of Tooling and Metadata APIs, there are likely to be more tools to choose from. Here are some of the best Salesforce tools and what they can do for your business.
Salesforce Deployment Tools to Know
Sandbox Refreshes
They bring your intuition into play when you are beginning work in testing and development areas. When produced, sandbox refreshes trace back to their own sandboxes and once production has occurred it is always great to refresh sandboxes.
You just have to be a little careful while refreshing sandboxes while adding new production data because it replaces all previous changes that were made on the said sandboxes. They behave just like your production organization will but you have to tweak all the right things if you will get the results you want. While the completion time of using this service application is mostly dependent on the administrator, once done you can easily do all your work without fuss, all by refreshing.
Tooling and metadata APIs
Recently Salesforce added quite a fleet of tooling and API options to their range of services to enable customers interact on their platform more easily. These are the most recent tools we talked about above. Some of the APIs namely the Tooling API and the Metadata API allow the customer to custom-make their own tooling and deployment applications.
The idea in these new applications is giving the administrator or user the freedom toMmake the application to suit best their need. Mavensmate and Force CLI are examples that use these APIs on their website to give you, the client, some independence while writing your own tooling and deployment applications. For those who have more in mind than just following what has been set for you in other design application then this is your chance to deploy your data and metadata in the best way you know how.
Integrated Development Environments (IDEs)
There are applications that could specifically deploy metadata such as Eclipse and Mavensmate. IDEs normally provide an interactive user interface for generating .xml file packages, which in essence is the content of a deployed metadata file. Additionally, some applications can offer a self-destruct option for data that is in deploy form as a means of deleting such data. Such a feature helps while seeking to delete some components from the entries in order to make new ones.
While the user might be worried about how to validate their deployment, applications that come with IDEs will come handy with a tool that readily validates your metadata, so half your work will be done for you by the application. On the flipside, most IDEs will not allow multiple entries of metadata which means that for each time you want to enter the data, you need to reselect it. Even for similar entries on different IDEs, the user will have to manually inert them as stated above.
Unmanaged Packages
Packages are bundles of components that constitute an application. They might also be a piece to a functionality that an administrator is building. Unmanaged packages in this case are used for single distribution purposes. They are the best for sharing application templates that the administrator is migrating from one application to another.
The installer will receive an independent duplicate of the sent components. These are probably the easiest tools for deploying under different sets of circumstances. They are the traditionally used avenues but can still be used to date, offering a repetitive click friendly approach of deploying metadata. Just at the click of your button, you will have entered your metadata with no fuss. However for this option, one cannot delete components of the data via destructive
changes made thereon.
Change sets
They are very similar to unmanaged packages and offer a quick click approach to entering data. However, the instances must be the same or at least similar, not allowing extrinsic transfer of metadata to another Salesforce site. It offers a special feature allowing the user to peruse components and previewing the dependencies before uploading the set. This tool offers repeatability where one can clone metadata and re-upload on anther Salesforce site if need be.
Change sets cannot however be changed from one format to another, such as when moving a staging sandbox to a
production data format. Another possible failure could be the impossibility of deleting components. Unlike IDEs, one cannot delete change sets’ components. If one component out of 200 is wrong, then it means deleting the links to all 199 of them or just creating a new change set, which could be very tedious. Similarly, one cannot make destructive changes to a change set, so you might as well do it the old fashioned way when it comes to
changesets.
Conclusion
Salesforce gives the client the power of choice for the kind of product that they feel will be best in their customer relationship management and the deployment service it offers. While choosing either of these Salesforce deployment tools one must envisage the goal they seek to achieve and the tool that is best suited for their purposes. For those who call themselves old- timers and may not have a problem with going over the same deployment more than once to achieve their goals then package data deployment may be their best option. The rest have quite the crowd to choose from.
The idea is that your data deployment is done efficiently. So it is only prudent to choose the tool that will help you get by faster, because your business would need more attention than deployment. But this is an equally important area to tackle. After all is said and done, Salesforce has given you the best range of choices for customer relationship management and Salesforce deployment tools that will help your business grow a bit faster.
