Migrating from Sandbox to Production in Salesforce
When you’re ready to take your Salesforce deployment live, it’s time to migrate your sandbox organization to your production environment. This process is crucial, as it ensures that all data, settings, and customizations are transferred smoothly, minimizing the risk of any unexpected issues. In this article, we’ll provide you with a step-by-step guide on how to migrate from sandbox to production, including some best practices to keep in mind along the way.
1. Preparation is Key
Before you start the migration process, there are several key steps you should complete in your sandbox environment.
Required Editions:
• Make sure that the sandbox organization has all the necessary features and customizations, such as API calls, scheduled jobs, or webhooks, in their correct format.
Test Data: Ensure that test data is available for various scenarios and edge cases. This includes data migration from an older version or platform, such as ERP, CRM, or CMS, as well as migration to a different Salesforce domain or account hierarchy.
Reports and Dashboards: Prepare custom reports and dashboards that require integration with specific tables or APIs.
Scripts and Automations: Identify any automated scripts, including batch processing, apex scripts, and workflows that should be carried over.
2. Create an Outbound Change Set in the Sandbox
To ensure data consistency, create a new outbound change set in the sandbox organization. Follow these steps:
- In your sandbox organization, go to Setup and enter ‘change set’ in the quick find box.
- Click on Outbound Change Set.
- Click ‘New’.
- Enter the new Change Set name and description.
3. Bundle and Upload the Sandbox Environment
Use the provided packaging tools or third-party packages to create a zip file of the sandbox environment.
| Bundle Requirements: | Requirement | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Classes | Include Apex classes and interfaces. | |
| Apex Pages | Comprises of page layouts and apex components. | |
| Record Types | Include customized record types, such as Contact, Account, Opportunity. | |
| Customization Settings | Custom settings like labels, permissions, workflows. |
Upload the package file to the production environment by going to Setup -> App Setup -> Develop -> Package and Upload.
4. Create a new user account for the Sandbox and Production environments
A common practice is to maintain different user accounts for your sandbox and production environments, both of which should be Salesforce Admin or Developer Users with similar profile settings, Apex classes, and customization capabilities.
5. Move Dashboards and Custom Report Types
To create reports and dashboards on production, duplicate the customized ones from your sandbox using Report Builder. This should involve duplicating the standard, default dashboard and also updating customizations, layout and any dependencies.
Best Practices to Keep in Mind
| Best Practices | Description | |
|---|---|---|
| Document Configuration | Record all customized fields, report types, workflow, etc. while exporting sandbox configurations. This aids in reproducing specific cases for your production migration process. | |
| Run automated scripts and workflows regularly before and during the deployment phase. | This involves execution of various automated test plans in sandbox for quality checks, code debugging, stress and load testing. Also ensures, reports, metrics are checked on daily basis as reports for users. These script tests your code | |
| Maintain and update necessary features for user roles such as API’s, UI5 | Check for roles changes during your migration which changes any other elements for specific functionalities that change. Then consider a "dry-run" deployment process before releasing final results | |
| For new org and sandbox versions create change set for different feature roll outs | With frequent release upgrades create the package sets or files for release | |
| Identify and Resolve API or dependency issues as your organization will be subject to production APIs | If certain objects use APIs, Identify all your objects first if the api is subject and have that resolved Before Sandbox Deployment in Production | For every upgrade, or upgrade versions from sandbox environments (not prod) |
Troubleshooting
: Perform test runs or data integrity tests to uncover issues with automated scripts before release, use debugging steps while deploying.
Review reports: Double-check performance with reporting as well test results after deployments.
The Salesforce sandbox and production environment offers you an opportunity to verify, troubleshoot and finalize configurations in a duplicate instance. A well-crafted plan helps ensure smoother integration between both environments with more precision control over sandbox features.
The migration steps for a seamless transition into a production environment are more dependent on an organization specific need to configure and package environment files properly. Understanding different sandbox edition and different users should make it to different role set or have different reports setup based on user for dashboard report layout. As each Salesforce account has there requirements that you might see in here some extra effort for those org’s migration. We all should agree that to prepare an upgrade sandbox then you get extra security against any sort of bug’s or production fail before go live so have best outcome
Best of Luck!
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