Old business management systems are fading due to their firm consistency on conventional approaches and manual efforts.  Due to constant failures experienced, there is an urgent demand of optimizing real-time information which is used to drive sales and effective traffic. Old methods will not give you that, more forward processes are coming up with a self-design system that can cater all your requirements and substantially benefit to your overall business growth. These self-design systems are nothing but CRM (Customer Relationship Management).

Enter Salesforce Cloud Platform!

It is expected that in mid-January, the number of Salesforce installation will surpass 5 million new users. As per an internal market research performed by Salesforce itself revealed that 70% of total users and above 88% of organizations optimize one Salesforce Product (app) at least.

Microsoft Dynamic CRM, Oracle, InfusionSoft, and Salesforce are some of the popular CRMs. Salesforce is one of the best CRM which is widely used by many organizations to leverage their workflow and increase their sales. Its professional edition helps the marketing team of organizations build and monitor campaigns for marketing to measure the success rate. On the basis of the tracked report, a sales team can improve leads and help an organization grow in a successful manner.

Salesforce is used to manage the sales pipeline, track customer details, and their interactions in order to retain the customers. Above 80% online retailers and marketers believe that Salesforce CRM is core to their business growth.

Whenever you started to think about integrating a CRM system, you are doing a much more to drive sales, automating marketing communications, boosting lead performance and overall efficiency of your business.

Salesforce is a responsible CRM which is providing many marketing benefits to its supporting organization. In this post, we are going to discuss some of the major benefits of Salesforce integration services.

Let’s have a look at the following points as per the market purposes :

• Automated Lead Qualification and Assignment

In every business, there are some common loopholes which are regularly overlooked and hence they will experience a poor lead quality. But that is not the case with Salesforce because the CRM is responsible for gathering customer data and with the help of this marketers can score and grade leads to increase sales. Many manual processes are cut down which is creating an effective, smooth and efficient sales reps automatically.

• Improved Revenue Tracking

How amazing it is when you can measure your efforts? Yes, Salesforce is tied to marketing automation system and ROI reporting is quite easy. There is bidirectional syncing which ensures mapping back of your CRM while creating campaigns in marketing automation. It is helpful in generating closed deals. This ability of loop reporting allows users to identify revenue factors for the campaign, track marketing expenditure, ROI, project cost and allow making data marketing decisions. As per the garter surveys, the global CRM industry aggregates $26.3 billion in 2015, a 12.3% growth in revenues in 2016.

• More Targeted Messages

As per the report of Pardot’s Demand generation Study, 77% of total buyers want unique, targeted content at each phase of their research.  On the basis of behavioral information which is been collected by any marketing automation tool, you can send targeted emails and messages to your customers according to buying cycle and prospects interest.

One-to-one communications or filtration of data based on criteria will add an icing on the cake as you can easily focus on your customer’s choice and deal them with exact their needs. This degree of relevancy to your emails helps businesses increase their engagement levels and create a more productive environment for their work.

Now as per the ease of optimizing this amazing CRM tool, we assure you of its functionalities which are again working as a sort of benefits. Have a glance at the following –

•  Ease of Integration

Approx 66% of buyers easily switch their brand if they could have treated like numbers instead of an individual. Salesforce has a large number of loyal customer bases. Things should be well sketched and easy to use. The very first thing arrives in the mind of every user, or a Salesforce developer is about how easy is the process of integration. Probably, it is a very straightforward method which is used to build custom-made interfaces from the ground level.

Moreover, the maintenance rate of Salesforce is not much high if trying to drip your project at best Salesforce maintenance services. You can get fixing out of your system bugs, error handling, overall changes to a new system, and adding new functionality to scheduling and monitoring etc.

As per the Gartner survey, it is revealed that 94% of the total Salesforce revenue is generated by the support and subscription fees while 6% comes from extra services. Salesforce majorly focuses on Supports and Subscriptions to grow its ROI exponentially.

• Gain Remarkable Insights

With the help of Salesforce, the sales and the financial team can combine and imagine business visibility which they have experienced never before. The duo can see things clearly and maintain transparency in business and view pipeline activities which can impact the business and help in verifying pricing in real-time, without leaving CRM.

More business-oriented decisions can be drawn which can help the constant growth of credit approvals, sales, and finance.

• Better Collaboration and Communication

You do not have to rely on phone calls or emails to get your work done. Integration of Salesforce helps you in many ways like you can get connected and communicate in a better way with the help of its chatter. Chatter works like an instant messenger and allows the business people to interact with it. People can have fastest decision making and quick problem resolution, which in turn boosting productivity across the organization.

Approx 83% of top rated organizations are using the customer data to streamline their business processes. These details may be collected from phone calls, emails and by advertising. Moreover, Salesforce is providing the number of ease in collecting these details.

• Outstanding User Resources

There are a number of user-resources are available on Salesforce blogs, such as informative articles, tutorials, eBooks, user guides and much more which covers the full spectrum of topics.

You can command everything from basic to the higher level. The educational blogs are providing an outstanding array of resources to the learners and users. Routinely webinars are hosted on YouTube channel covers comprehensive web-accessible user guide. Self-help style resources of Salesforce also employs an outstanding, well-informed and customer-oriented service team in support that can help immediately to the problem arises.

Streamlined Workflows

Things are easily processed with just one click. One click is all to set your tasks in an order. There are various applications released in AppExchange such as 9Docs which is a product created for sales and finance to record revenue automatically when the sale is made. Moreover, your orders get automatically turn into invoices. The errors are reduced significantly which is helpful in streamline the workflow. As per the report, 72% of top marketing firms will increase their expenditure on Salesforce marketing tools in next two years.

• Excellent Functionality

Salesforce provides easy data collaboration between different work areas, an array of reports and the ability to run any browser, tablet desktop or mobile device.

The data inside the Salesforce CRM is stored in a secure and reliable way. It provides your employees with the right tools and resources s to maximize productivity and efficiency. It further allows companies to track and measure the success of marketing campaigns and to customize outreach efforts as required. The cloud system is allowing for incredible flexibility to employees as they can access it anytime and from anywhere.

• The AppExchange

It is an app store for Salesforce products or apps. Many customizing services released their own created Salesforce applications in AppExchange. You can get a bundle of applications of various functionalities. Moreover, it is easy to access, download and install its applications which are providing ease of performing various functionalities and resources to users.

Big companies like LinkedIn and Microsoft have their apps which enables full integration of many services with Salesforce. AppExchange is a place for creating new ideas and capabilities to deliver in the form of apps. These apps serve as power tools.

Conclusion

Salesforce is a powerful platform. It offers a number of ways to help its users, customers, and developers to get complete advantages from its capabilities. Businesses are customizing Salesforce as per their requirements to benefit customers and make the CRM more powerful for the users from all sectors.

Being the most widely known CRM, Salesforce is offering a number of advantages to organizations, users, and developers with the broad range of applicability and effectiveness in solutions.

As a learner, we advise you to be calm and learn each and every aspect related to Salesforce. Discover everything that crosses your way and keeps an eye on the latest update. Practice apps and its awesome products if you really want to start your career in Salesforce.

Hope this piece of write up may add some extra knowledge in your mind. Do share your views on it. If you want to share any missing benefit, you can share that as well. Good Luck with your practices!!

Salesforce is known for its best CRM services in the world. The recent incorporation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology had led Salesforce towards many new developments. With the help of this, now users can build apps that becomes smarter with each click. Also, Salesforce Einstein provides a platform for improving data recovery, lead scoring and gives suggestions.

The Winter’18Salesforce comes with features that are leveraging the benefits of Lightning Experience (LEX). Salesforce development team is trying its best to make Lightning Experience more accessible and presentable for the users.

Here are some exciting Salesforce features that are being released and will dominate the market in 2018.

(Note: These features are applicable to only Lightning experience)

1.     Easier Account Setup

Salesforce has introduced this feature into its lightning Experience. It allows the organizations to access person’s account only if they meet the requirements.  After Salesforce verifies that you are fit to access the account, they send a confirmation mail along with logging a support case information.

You can also share your business contacts by implementing specific sharing rules.

2.     Opportunities

This functionality aids user to add an opportunity team quickly allowing users to add products instantly whenever they develop or duplicate an opportunity. Adding multiple members on a single page has become easier and faster.

3.     Activities

This feature turns out to be a friend to all of them who forgot their tasks. Salesforce allows you to archive your history and let you create activity timeline. You can also use task reminders to notify you about your tasks. Apart from this, save your all-time history and access them when you need them.

4.     Customizable List View

Salesforce allows you to structure your text into column view. The ability to adjust column according to the screen size gave users a better experience. The length of the data defines size of the column list and related list.

These were the generalized features which will create an impact on the Salesforce’s sales and services by engaging many customers in 2018.

Now let’s see some of the insight features of Lightning experience that are prompting opportunities in the market.

·        New Look and Feel Feature

This feature ensures that user’s data is of core focus point thus, there are less white spaces to improve the clarity. This will also enhance the information density on a page and will decrease the scrolling.

Apart from this perfect contrast is created between background and foreground to facilitate easy scanning of information. And more background images along with wide color variant are also introduced in this feature.

·        Search Better

We often misspell our words in the search box and thus couldn’t get our queries resolved. But the new Lightning Experience feature brings a better search drop down list where it will show correct suggestions that perfectly matches your misspelled words. If you have entered multiple search request than it will check for the first term only.

This feature has made it easy and quick to find contacts and other fields by including account name in their search term.

·        Component visibility

This feature provides you to customize data according to your needs. In classic Salesforce customization, this feature was absent. It shows all the significant data that is closely related to the field criteria on a single page.

·        Chatter Highlights

This interesting feature allows the users to put on a message on his Chatter if he is not on his desk. By enabling “Out of Office” setting and mentioning duration you can tell everyone who tries to contact you that you are out of office by displaying a message.

Recently emoticons have been also added to chatter to make interaction friendlier.

Wrapping Up

Growing technologies opens up the door for Salesforce integration services for creating more exciting and helpful features for customers. Salesforce has released over 300 product innovations in winter’18 release. These features are centered on providing users with smarter and faster platforms like Salesforce Lightning experience and Einstein intelligence.

There is no doubt that in 2018 there’s going to be more innovations in Salesforce platforms to enhance customers experience and make their lives better. As the time is changing fast be ready to update yourself with current trends and take advantage out of these features.

If you are using Salesforce, you would be having a lot of data stored in Salesforce objects. Some of it would be sensitive data, and some of it would even be sensitive enough that you don’t want anyone to look at it, like revenue related data. So the question is, is the data on your Salesforce implementation secure enough? How fastidious are you about your customer’s or company’s sensitive data and how to make sure that the data remains secure and be accessible to particular eyes necessarily?

This post is for those paranoid-at-heart people who are not satisfied with Salesforce’s high level default data security standards and protocols.

How many time have you herd the sentence “SECURITY is never enough” ? especially in IT and digital services we always add new fences, walls and procedures to prevent any type of breach. One of the impacts of the ever growing security threats are the new laws regarding Data Privacy like the GDPR recently applied in the EU.

Every company and organization today holds Private Customer Data, which is normally stored in our CRM DB, but on the other hand we need to use this data to provide services to our customers and partners. In order to make sure only the right person gets access to his personal data we must use a smart validation also knows as 2 factor authentication.

According to Wikipedia: “Two-factor authentication (also known as 2FA) is a method of confirming a user’s claimed identity by utilizing a combination of two different components. Two-factor authentication is a type of multi-factor authentication. A good example from everyday life is the withdrawing of money from a ATM; only the correct combination of a bank card(something that the user possesses) and a PIN (personal identification number, something that the user knows) allows the transaction to be carried out.”

When it comes to Salesforce we know they invest millions in keeping our Data safe and as long as our users are working in salesforce then no data loss is expected unless done intentionally by a trusted employee or advisor. On the other hand when we build services on top of salesforce to support our business needs the responsibility to keep the Data safe is on us and with the new Data Privacy laws any type of breach could mean a huge penalty (up to 20M Euro according to the GDPR).

As salesforce administrators, developers and implementers we need to make sure that any service we offer to our customers, partners, associates, members or any other outsider will undergo smart validation using 2FA authentication.

Self-service is the practice of serving oneself, classic example is the Automatic Teller Machines(ATMs) in the banking world, which revolutionized how people withdraw and deposit funds. In the digital world self-service comes in many forms – password reset, service request, online check-in, incident report (e.g. power outage) and many more. You might even say that self-service is the highest form of service you can offer your customers, where you give them the ability to control what to do, when to do it and how to do it. More advanced form of self-service create interaction with the customer based on logical conditions and integration to your salesforce CRM.

Imagine what you could do if you had the option to give your customers and partners the ability to read and update multiple salesforce objects (including custom ones) from 1 FORM. Using FORMTITAN you can do it without a single line of code and all you need is a salesforce account and creativity.

Empowering your customers and partners will not only save you operational cost it will also boost your sales and collaboration. Self-service create the echo system for collaboration and knowledge sharing between your customers giving you the insight to new information generating new lead options, business opportunities and even ideas for new products and services.

Here are few examples for Self-Service:Problem Solving – using logical conditions and integration to your knowledge base you can create smart Forms, which lead to user interaction where the customer will try to resolve the problem by answering a set of dynamic questions, if not successful open a case in your CRM is always the last step and no customer support representative was involved at any stage.

Service Request – your product and services base is constantly changing and updating, when integrated with your CRM you can immediately expose your customers and partners to your new portfolio giving them the ability to request new services and products and increase your sales and revenue.

Dashboards – every customer, manager, partner and anyone else involved in a sales process, service request or incident wants to know “what is the status”. Instead of having them call your customer service, be frustrated and in the dark, give them the ability to see what is going on at any stage or time and leave their feedback.

Reports – reports are important for business, this is the best way to get insight into your business transactions and operation, they help you better plan your future requirements and strategy. Giving your customers and partners the ability to design and build the reports they need will bring them business value and create dependency on your services. By giving more, you will get more, every report they will create is yours to view and use to improve your services and products.

Why to use Self-service is clear, what you can do with it is up to you but the best way to do it when working with salesforce is using FORMTITAN.

Big data analytics is no longer a mystery that each and every IT guru uses in a conference. It is now a common tool deployed by business organizations with huge success. Although the term is now common in IT circles and among custom software development services, most businesses have yet to benefit from the concept, even as more advances are made on leveraging it. Although the amount of data, structured and unstructured has been the focus in the last few years, now the shift is towards what the data lakes could actually do for a business.

THE THREE V’S IN BIG DATA

It is important for a software development company in USA and all service providers worldwide to determine large data volumes. For the data to qualify as huge data, it should conform to the three V’s.

1. Volume. Now, organizations are inundated with data from all sources, which include survey, transactions, and machine-to-machine and social media. With the emerging new technologies, it’s now easier to handle the huge data volumes.

2. Variety. A business should be ready to handle data from all sources in all format. From traditional databases, both structured and unstructured, the data management system of an organization should be optimized to handle various data.

3. Velocity. Handling of data in real-time is more urgent than ever. Businesses are looking for instant insight on customers to boost their interactions. RFID tags as well as smart metering are few of the technologies that necessitate fast data processing.

HOW SALESFORCE MAKES BIG DATA EASIER

Even some of the best software development websites and business organizations are still not benefiting from Big Data. The use of outdated and unscalable traditional databases is one of the reason for this. In order to mitigate this, Salesforce, a notable CRM and SaaS launched the greatly acclaimed Wave Analytics Platform back in 2014. Nevertheless, this was still not enough, since it launched the Salesforce Wave for Big Data in 2015. This has been one of the most anticipated tools, since it is a partnership with several of the largest data organizations in the world, such as Google, New Relic, Hortonworks, Trifacta, Informatica and Cloudera. By joining forces with the data lake enablers, Salesforce is completing the last mile that eluded most business organizations. The idea is to help enterprises unlock value from data analytics and in the process acquire new insights on the customers.

RIDING ON THE WAVE OF BIG DATA ANALYTICS

During the partnership launch, Salesforce noted that at the rate of the doubling modern data these days, there would be 44 trillion gigabytes of data available to organizations by 2020. Sadly, without advanced partnerships and leveraging data analytics, the organizations would only analyze 1 percent of the data available. The partnership between Salesforce, the largest CRM organization in the world with top big data companies would make use of more Big Data a reality. The Salesforce Wave for Big data offers a smarter way of getting better insight fast. With Salesforce GitHub, developers will get to enjoy more special coding capacities.

PARTNERSHIPS OF THE COMPANIES

The partnerships between the companies is meant to empower all kinds of data users to explore different data and take action fast for better business outcomes. The Salesforce Wave for Big data could extend the variety and volume of data accessed by a business owner faster. Now, business managers have a tool, which enable them to discover patterns across a huge variety of data. The following are how the companies would correlate on the partner ecosystem.

1. Google. Now, marketing executives could use services that are available on Google cloud with Salesforce customer profiles. It’s now possible to discover a correlation between the profile of a customer and actual engagement information, like purchases from Google cloud.

2. Cloudera. This is a vital platform used along with Salesforce CRM demographics for targeting the right audience dur8ing a loyalty program. Now, marketers could identify a correlation between products usage on Cloudera, with Salesforce data.

3. Hortonworks. This is an enterprise-grade data platform enabling businesses to optimize Hadoop clusters power. Organizations could now use such optimized data in learning about economic trends as well as other issues that could be used to boost services.

3. Trifacta. This is an important tool for minimizing the big task involved in dealing with big data. The platform enables data specialists to clean up and improve data available on the analytical cloud.

4. New Relic. This is integral for companies that are looking for real-time analysis of interactions with target audience. Marketers could check out both the present behavior on a retail page and their purchases history to boost cross-selling techniques.

5. Informatica. It brings together business analysts, IT specialists and citizen integrators to integrate all kinds of data for analytic cloud.

Today, Salesforce and new best friends are working to make it easier to move data in and out of the Salesorce’s Wave Analytics cloud for further poking, analysis and prodding.

There are many uses case that will require your customer to manually sign a Document, few examples are: NDA, Contract or Power of Attorney.

In other cases, you may need to issue a letter to your customer, few examples are: Order Document, Thank you Letter, Service Bill or any other type of report or service Letter.

Customers today will not accept any type of paper form, farther more they expect everything to be available for them on their mobile, they want to do it now and they want an immediate response.

Every management will expect their Digital and IT department to provide these services and to have them integrated with the companies CRM platform.

To provide these services you will need to overcome 3 main challenges:

·       How do I incorporate salesforce data into the document?

·       How do I incorporate user inserted data into the Document?

·       How do I get my user to digitally sign the Document?

Using FORMTITAN Salesforce Visual Composer you can overcome these challenges without a single line of code or heavy budget expense.

Wondering how to create a separate environment for development? Looking for different configurations and use cases? Salesforce Sandboxes might be the answer… You might be wondering, this post is in wrong timing or you might be leaning towards Salesforce DX. Of course, it is an amazing product. 🙂

Sandboxes never cross their path with Salesforce DX nor DX is a replacement for sandboxes.  Below is an explanation from the product managers of Salesforce DX:

It’s worth noting that scratch orgs aren’t a replacement for sandboxes. Sandboxes are an important part of the larger development lifecycle, and work with our new source-driven development process as the destination for packages built directly from source. All sandbox types, from developer to full, offer the ability to act as user acceptance testing (UAT) and staging environments of the production org.

So for now let’s get into how sandboxes are useful for the team in Developing and testing (But don’t worry, I will be posting a separate article for all Dx enthusiasts out there). Salesforce Sandboxes are definitely a boon for the team to make copies of the production environments. These come in pretty handy if you’re into developing and testing, and are perfect for building effectively in the Salesforce.

But wait! Do they come in different types to help you solve different problems? You guessed right as there are four different types of Sandbox. These are:

• Developer Sandbox
• Developer Pro Sandbox
• Partial Copy
• Full Sandbox

All of these  Sandboxes fulfill some primary use cases and you can use them for different purposes. So, you might be thinking that which one is the most effective Sandbox design? Let us find out.

But first, let’s understand about software development cycle for Salesforce

The cycle that is usually followed for software development for Salesforce starts with the generation of ideas. A company would then put these ideas in the backlog, from where they can prioritize.

The next step is the development process. First there is the developing and testing, followed by QA, and finally, there is the User Acceptance testing (UAT). Once everything is approved, you move into the production phase.

The Salesforce Sandboxes Desing Environmental Management primarily focuses on the developmental process.

Still confused as to why it’s important to have a good Sandbox design? It is essential to have a good Sandbox design for a number of reasons. It is a good practice to create separate environments for your development, your testing, and your training. Having a good Sandbox design is also a great way to develop a regular release status.

But there are other reasons tooOther reasons for  having a good Sandbox design matters include:

• It provides more stability for your different activities. So the different teams can work simultaneously, without halting any of the processes.
• It helps shorten the cycle times for trials and testing, even though an organization may have to manage a greater number of environments.
• Helps you create realistic training and testing environments, helping you reduce operational risks, raise your productivity, and efficiency, and ultimately enhance your user satisfaction and increased business volumes.

So, how many types Salesforce Sandboxes, are there, to be honest? 

There are four different types of Sandboxes offered by Salesforce, with their distinctive use cases and configurations. These include:

Developer Sandbox: This is the special configuration sandbox meant for coding and testing by one single developer at a time. So you can develop in isolation, and are widely considered to be the most agile environment to work in. This Sandbox design has a refresh interval of one day. It is a configuration-only but doesn’t include any sample data. It has a data limit of 200 MB.

Developer Pro Sandbox: The primary difference between the Developer Sandbox and the Developer Pro Sandbox is the data limit. With the Developer Pro Sandbox, you can store data up to 1 GB. The other major difference is that the Dev Pro Sandbox design also helps you grab some amount of product data. Just like the Developer Sandbox environment, it can be refreshed every single day. It also includes setup configuration.

Partial Copy Sandbox: This is possibly the most ideal Sandbox design available to users. It is a great blend of the basic Dev and Dev Pro Sandbox designs and the Full Sandbox. It comes with a full set of your customizations. It also comes with a very easy way of getting some sample data. The data limit for this environment is 5 GB.

Full Sandbox: This is considered to be the least agile environment. Developing in the Full Sandbox environment can become quite a challenge, as it can be refreshed only once a month (29 days). But on the plus side, it is a full copy of your production environment.  This is the ideal environment for conducting all the expanded testing. It also allows the users to pick specific data and objects, and copy them to their Sandbox.

Cool, isn’t it?

Now, don’t you want to know some of the use cases for each of the Sandbox designs?

The Developer and Dev Pro designs are ideal for building and coding in isolation. They may also be used for some limited amount of QA purposes. More complex types of testings, the Partial Copy is more suitable. It is suitable for batch data testing, training environment, and integration testing. In case of more complex performance testing, UAT, and staging, the Full Copy is more suitable.

Why can’t I use a Full-Copy for the whole lifecycle??? Is everything hunky-dory, then? To be very honest, that would be the worst idea ever, and there will be a lot of issues in using the Full Sandbox environment to do all of the work, including the development, QA, UAT, training, staging, and production support. Here are some issues that one may encounter:

• It can slow down the overall development, testing, and release.
• All the different processes become fully reliant on one particular sandbox, halting a process in order for another one to start.
• Running multiple releases is definitely not a possibility in the Full Sandbox design.
• Its really difficult to run a refresh, as its going to halt all the different works.

Now, what are the Best Sandbox Practices you can adopt?

The first step to developing a good Sandbox practice is to plan. You need to think about your release process and determine which are the environments that you need. Here are some questions that will help you map out your requirements better:

• Where are you going to develop the new features?
• Where are these new features going to be tested?
• Where are your UAT going to be completed?
• Where are you going to do your training?

Once you have determined the answers to these questions, you will be able to develop a solid “Refresh and Release” calendar. This step is very important, as it will help you map out your timeline better. Determine the Sandbox design and make it work now….

Depending on your “Refresh and Release” calendar, you can chalk out whether you want to go for the Dev and Dev Pro one day refresh cycle, or a 5-day refresh cycle with the Partial copy, or a 29-day cycle with the Full Copy Salesforce Sandbox design.

The cool would be to plan out a comprehensive Test Data Management Strategy. The downside is that in the Dev and Dev Pro designs, there is very limited data space available. If you’re planning to use either of these, it is a good idea to explore the internal and third-party data tools to help you combat this.

Build time for deploying configuration between the different environments that you are going to use. You should also make sure to document all the sandbox refresh procedures. This is especially important in case of reuse across multiple people, including developers and admins.

You also need to appoint a release manager to your team. This person will be responsible for the overall decisions and activities within the environments.

What’s an ideal Sandbox architecture? Although there is no common architecture that is suitable for all customers, there is one that is quite popular among the Salesforce clients. You can use this as a guide to help determine the most effective Sandbox design for your organization’s requirements.

If you’re looking at a concurrent development, multiple sandboxes are the ideal way to go. You can have a mix of Developer and Developer Pro environments. Here you can merge all the codes that are being written, constantly, and also keep running the unit tests.

Once your codes are ready, you can move them into a QA environment. The Partial Sandbox design is the best-suited environment for this use case. This helps you use multiple templates at the same time.

Once the QA team has given the go-ahead, you can move into the UAT phase, this is where the Full Copy design is ideal. It is also a great Sandbox for staging. Once this phase is also approved, you can move into the production.

Deployment options for environments

Change Sets: This is a simple and declarative way to move your changes between environments. It uses easy point and click method to add the changes, configurations, and codes to a changeset. Once the changes are moved, they can be easily deployed to any Org within the environment.

Force.com Migration Tool: This is a free tool provided by Salesforce, but is a bit more complex to use. It is a command line utility built on an open source project called Ant. This is great for large development projects for moving metadata packages.

Third Party Tools: There are a lot of third-party deployment tools that Salesforce offers for its Sandbox migrations. These provide features such as automation and continuous integration. Examples include AutoRabit, Eclipse IDE, Copado and many others.

But it gets better…

There have been many enhancements that have made the Salesforce Sandbox experience all the more smooth for users. Take for example the Sandbox post creation refresh scripting, that allows you to fire an Apex class immediately upon creation or refreshing of a Sandbox.

Now that you know the different types of Sandboxes and their use cases and enhancements, what are you waiting for?  Go ahead suggest to your customers, bring them inline with Salesforce Best Practices in Sandbox Design. 🙂