Salesforce Diaries

Over the years, after encountering both successful and painful Salesforce deployments, I’ve seen one approach that has worked well in managing environments and ensuring a successful deployment for the customer. Here are some of my top tips for performing deployments. 1 Build Management Throughout the Project Implementing and maintaining a simple change log, which captures all config and code changes can really help in knowing exactly what has changed in the system. A simple excel file shared on tools such as Google Drive can do this job, with columns such as the following can be used to maintain the change log: Change Name Components Changed Component Type Reason Changed By Change Owner Deployed Date When looking back at the file to understand the reasons of change later, it is much easier to step back and unders...

Salesforce offers a few options to deploy config and code between sandboxes and into production. Most commonly used is the standard inbuilt changeset option, allowing a user to select the exact components they wish to deploy and use the Salesforce interface to manage and perform the deployment. There are times however when changesets can be a little ineffective, especially when needing to select and deploy a large set of components or the need to perform repeated deployments. In these circumstances it may be better to use the Ant Migration Tool to perform the deployment. Steps to using the Ant Migration Tool are listed below: Step 1 - Download the Force.com Migration tool . A direct link to the zip file can be found here . Step 2 - Save the zip file and extract it to a local folder on your hard disk. Step 3 - Navigate to the /samples directory within the zip file. Step 4 - Open the build.properties file and setup your username and password for your source...