Gearset's repo dependency cleaner - keep your metadata deployable

Jonathan Plumridge on February 14th 2020

Gearset has always championed the use of source control within Salesforce DevOps. We make it easy for teams to build a release process around source control, and it's been great to see more and more teams reaping the rewards of doing just that. What's more, we also help you to overcome potential difficulties that come from using a version control system (VCS). Gearset's repo dependency cleaner fixes one such difficulty: metadata in a Git repo becoming undeployable.

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Troubleshooting Salesforce deployments with Shield Platform Encryption settings

Eric Kintzer on January 27th 2020

Today’s troubleshooting guide is written by the awesome Eric Kintzer, Salesforce Architect at Helix, and Gearset Community Advisor.

To protect your Salesforce data with an added layer of security, you may have opted for Shield Platform Encryption; the next step up from Salesforce’s Classic Encryption. This option allows you to encrypt a much wider subset of standard and custom fields, as well as person accounts, cases, search, approval processes, and other key Salesforce features.

However, orgs that adopt Shield Platform Encryption will face certain subtleties when deploying encryption settings. This article exposes some of these common quirks and how to work around them.

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How McKesson deploys with Gearset: a walkthrough video with Monica Thornton Hill, Salesforce Developer

Ellis Toms on January 8th 2020

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'Duplicate picklist value' deployment error for 'AddressStateCode'

Valerio Chang on January 7th 2020

At Gearset, our dedicated Customer Success team is always on hand to help you out if you ever get stuck. Just alert us to the problem in our in-app chat, and we'll take a look. More often than not, we'll have come across the issue before, or else our friendly developers will jump in with their wealth of experience to sort the difficulty out with you. But every now and then, one of our users will stumble upon an error in the Salesforce Metadata API that we're powerless to fix. A good example is the bug that causes Salesforce to raise the Duplicate picklist value specified:AG deployment error.

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Package-based workflows for devs and admins

Tom Smith on December 2nd 2019

Packages are designed to take the complexity (or 'dependency hell') out of developing, updating and releasing new software features. Salesforce's unlocked packages, also referred to as second-generation packaging (2GP), make it possible for teams to develop and deploy self-contained units of code. As part of Salesforce DX, unlocked packages support a modern, modular and iterative development process on the platform.

At Gearset, we help teams who use unlocked packages get the most out of streamlined workflows that work for both devs and admins. Recently, we've added some useful alerts to our metadata deployment and continuous integration processes. Whenever a user attempts to deploy changes to components within an unlocked package, we make sure they're made aware of what they're doing. We might not be able to prevent folks from altering packages directly in production (however much we'd like to sometimes 😉), but at least we can alert you when they do. That way, you can prevent changes made in your production org from being overwritten when the packages get updated later on.

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Data backup is out of beta!

David Runciman on November 12th 2019

Another important milestone, and another exciting moment for us and our users: data backup is now out of beta! At Gearset, we're all about providing the best, most comprehensive set of tools for Salesforce DevOps, so we're thrilled to announce that our data backup is now in general release.

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Understanding your Salesforce org comparison in Gearset - an Architect's perspective

Marc Behr on November 11th 2019

Today's post is brought to you by Marc Behr, Salesforce Solutions Architect, Dreamforce speaker and one of Gearset's Community Advisors.

Before deploying changes between Salesforce environments, it's really important you understand the shape of your source and target. By being able to see how they compare, and how they differ, you're in a much stronger position to build deployment packages that will keep your orgs in sync. This is why a comparison is always the first step in your deployment process with Gearset.

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Redeploy packages to a new target with Gearset

Jess Wilkinson on October 29th 2019

As those of you familiar with Gearset are likely aware, most things in Gearset start with a comparison. Gearset takes the metadata for two orgs and runs a comparison between them, which has lots of benefits. Comparisons underpin many of Gearset’s useful features, like the ability to decompose and recompose complex metadata types to avoid conflicts, perform sophisticated dependency analysis and highlight when you might be about to overwrite something by mistake.

Comparisons let you build deployments in Gearset painlessly. But what if you need to ship the same changes to multiple environments? If you’re running a lot of comparisons, waiting for them to finish can slow your process down. Combine this with the need to monitor subsequent stages of Gearset’s workflow, such as manually selecting components to deploy and running problem analysers, and it quickly gets time-consuming to rebuild deployment packages. Fortunately, there’s good news: Gearset now lets you deploy the same package to a new target org without initiating a new comparison or repeating the analysis steps.

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Webinar recording: Git for Salesforce Admins, part 2

David Runciman on October 16th 2019

Gearset is currently running a webinar series: 'Git for Admins'. Our aim in the series is to explain the benefits of a Git-based workflow to everyone involved in developing on the Salesforce platform, because we're committed to the principle that Git isn't just for developers.

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How to set up automatic validations of pull requests for orgs in a CI workflow

Jess Wilkinson on October 7th 2019

At Gearset, we’re always listening to our users. From feature requests to pain points, your feedback shapes what we build. Recently, we heard from Salesforce teams using the feature branch model about some changes we could make to improve the way Gearset handles CI jobs across multiple feature branches. In light of this feedback, we’ve added automatic pull request validations to Gearset’s continuous integration feature.

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Live webinar: Getting hands-on with Git for Salesforce

Tina Budhrani on August 27th 2019

When it comes to setting up a Git-based workflow for Salesforce, everyone wants to get it just right. All teams have their own ways of working when deploying changes from version control to Salesforce environments and automating releases to staging and production orgs. But regardless of the exact model you follow, there are patterns, commands and tools that any team using Git should be familiar with. It's time to get hands-on with Git.

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A guide to diagnosing CI job failures

Eric Kintzer on August 26th 2019

Today’s post is brought to you by the wonderful Eric Kintzer, Salesforce Architect and one of Gearset’s Community Advisors.

A common use of Gearset is to run Continuous Integration (CI) jobs between your source control and a reference org (let's say, the CI org) to check that your changes:

• Are deployable (with no missing components)
• Don't break regression tests

Gearset runs a comparison between the source branch and the CI org (no different than any other comparison) and then deploys the changed metadata and runs the tests specified in the CI job setup. CI jobs can be validation-only or full-on deploys.

If you get errors, the View History button on the CI job run lets you see what went wrong to help you fix any issues just like any normal deployment.

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Gearset is now ISO 27001 certified!

David Runciman on August 15th 2019

We're delighted to announce that Gearset is now ISO 27001 certified!

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Track Apex code quality with informative visuals

Matt Guy on August 15th 2019

Static code analysis (SCA) is a method developers use to detect errors and issues with their code - in our case, Apex. While nobody's opposed to improving the quality of their code, too often SCA tools generate long lists of code violation warnings that make it difficult for teams to focus on areas to improve, or even know what to start with!

Gearset's SCA feature already helps users to focus on specific problem areas in their codebase by allowing them to customize the rulesets that determine how code violations are displayed. We think it's much easier to start with the ruleset that matters most to you, and to track violations of important rules before expanding your ruleset once you get those violations under control. So we've added some user-friendly visualization to help you get a better overview of the quality of your code and track trends over time.

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Webinar recording: Git for Salesforce Admins

Tina Budhrani on August 15th 2019

Gearset's webinar on Git for Salesforce Admins gives you a sweeping overview of all things Git and puts you on the right track for setting up a Git-based workflow. It focuses on some of the key things that you need to know about adopting Git specifically for Salesforce. Git holds the key to modern release management and is definitely not just something for developers!

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Create pull requests in Bitbucket from Gearset's UI

Catherine Bacon on August 7th 2019

Back in January this year, we made it possible for users with GitHub accounts to create pull requests in GitHub without leaving Gearset's user interface. Now we know plenty of folks who prefer Bitbucket for version control - often it's because of the platform's tight integration with Jira. But, whatever your preference, Gearset plays nice with all major Git platforms! So, really, it was just a matter of time before the requests for the same functionality for Bitbucket were coming in thick and fast, too.

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Validated packages: you can now review all test run details

Matt Guy on August 7th 2019

For Salesforce developers and admins, deployment is the moment of truth. There's always a risk that something will go wrong. There isn't always much time to fix it.

Checking your deployment package ahead of time minimizes this risk, which is why Gearset lets you validate your package before deployment.

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Live webinar: Git for Salesforce Admins - why, how and when?

Tina Budhrani on July 12th 2019

Have you ever had changes to your org overwritten by a colleague? When Salesforce teams collaborate - making changes to developer orgs, deploying to sandboxes and releasing to production - all sorts of things can go horribly wrong. You’re about to deploy, but your workflow stalls because of a code conflict. What's more, there's a bug somewhere and you don't know who introduced it or when. And to cap it all off, you can’t even remember which set of changes were deployed to UAT. Maybe it’s time to think about using source control.

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ExperienceBundle: human-readable communities

Ian Hand on June 28th 2019

Salesforce Lightning communities are a great way to drive collaboration between your team members and your customers. That said, collaborative development of communities has always been difficult. Luckily, the new ExperienceBundle metadata type is here to change that!

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Updates on Jira integration

Gabriel Cowley on June 26th 2019

Gearset’s integration with Jira has been around for a while now and has made it easier for users to automatically track the progress of user stories. Since its initial release, it has evolved in response to the helpful user feedback we’ve received. This article outlines some of the improvements that we’ve made over the past several months to Gearset’s Jira integration.

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Introducing Salesforce data masking in Gearset

Tom Smith on June 25th 2019

Using realistic data for testing is a great way to find bugs earlier in your CI pipeline. The best data that you'll ever be able to use for testing is your production data. It contains the intricacies that your code needs to deal with. However, regulations and controls restrict access to sensitive information stored in production. In the past, this might have prevented you from using production data for testing.

The good news is that Gearset now supports data masking during data deployments. Data masking obfuscates sensitive information while maintaining the complex relationships within your data.

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What’s new with Lightning Web Components?

Oli Lane on June 21st 2019

In the Spring ‘19 release, Salesforce introduced a new way of creating Lightning components - Lightning Web Components (LWC). In a blog post at the time, we explained what LWC are and what benefits they offer Salesforce developers - but in the months since, there’s been lots of exciting news.

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Good Salesforce data practices

Tom Smith on May 20th 2019

The process of deploying data between Salesforce orgs can be a difficult and fraught affair. There’s so much to consider and remember, especially when deploying critical data to production. Complex data relationships with all manner of references between record types mean that you have to consider dependencies, relationship handling and field mapping before deploying records to your target. All of this can be a time-consuming and error-prone process to say the least.

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How to restore your Profiles and PermissionSets after Salesforce outage

Kevin Boyle on May 18th 2019

On the 17th May 2019, an incident occurred where a significant portion of Salesforce customers had their orgs modified unexpectedly, and their permission model corrupted. The permissions and profiles of those affected orgs were all granted the Modify All Data permission. The impact of that change was that all users on the org could access and modify all data in the org, regardless of their profile level. This is an ongoing incident, so refer to https://trust.salesforce.com for the latest updates and the root cause analysis.

In this blog post, I’ll walk through how users of Gearset Enterprise can get their profiles and permission sets back to the state they were in before the incident occurred.

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SSH support for custom git connections

Gabriel Cowley on April 26th 2019

For quite a while now, Gearset has supported integration with source control platforms via OAuth or via a custom git connection that uses a username and password to authenticate via HTTPS. You can find more details on this feature here. While the existing feature covered most of the required scenarios for integrating your git repositories with Gearset, some of our users requested SSH support for custom git connections. We're therefore pleased to announce that the latest release of Gearset supports SSH for custom git connections. Below are a few simple instructions on how to set up an SSH-based custom git connection.

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GitHub build statuses for your Gearset CI jobs

Gabriel Cowley on April 24th 2019

As an admin or developer, when you’re making changes to a Salesforce environment and pushing them to a branch in GitHub, you’ll want to regularly check that these changes are actually building and deployable. Until recently, the best way to do that would be setting up a CI job to monitor your branch and push any changes to a sandbox environment, where you’d be able to see whether they’re deployable and working as expected. While this technique works well, it means you have to actively keep a close eye on the CI jobs page, which could be easy to forget about in our busy schedules.

One of our latest features ties your CI job back to your branch in GitHub: with each commit you'll be able to see a build status in GitHub, so you can see on the branch itself whether the job is succeeding, and whether your changes are deployable. Commit-by-commit build statuses means that if your CI job does start to fail, you’ll notice much quicker and be able to see exactly which commit caused the problem. This helps you get to the root of the issue faster, and fix it right away.

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Smart data deployment filters

Alex Walter on April 23rd 2019

Gearset's data loader is an incredibly effective way to deploy data from one org to another, whether for sandbox seeding, debugging, or just general day-to-day feature development. That said, until recently, its ability to narrow down to a specific subset of interesting records was fairly limited.

In a recent release, we've made some changes to make it much easier to define the specific set of records you want to deploy. By applying logical operators, such as a multi-value OR, an is empty or an is not empty operator, you can include all the records you need in a single deployment, rather than having to do multiple deployments between the same two orgs. Similarly, you might want to use a greater than or a less than operator to include all the records created or modified before or after a particular date and time.

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What we're doing to make data deployments more successful

Tom Smith on April 5th 2019

Errors during data deployments can be confusing to say the least. Here's some of the recent changes which will help you deploy your data.

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Why is my CI deployment taking longer than expected?

Eric Kintzer on April 1st 2019

Today’s post is brought to you by our good friend Eric Kintzer, Salesforce Architect and one of Gearset’s Community Advisors.

Assumption: you’ve configured an automatic deployment from source control to your continuous integration (CI) org.

When deploying in this situation, the developer wants the deployment to run as quickly as possible. When it does not, the developer's workflow is interrupted and, if not addressed, results in repeated frustration every time one commits to master (such as after a code review of a pull request).

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Attach Azure DevOps work items to your Salesforce deployments

Calvin Childs on April 1st 2019

At Gearset, we want to make it as easy as possible for you to build the release process that works best for you. This means making sure you have everything you need in one place - integrating with your favourite tools to ensure your process is streamlined and simple.

Continuing on this mission, we’ve added a new work tracking feature for anyone that uses Azure DevOps (formerly known as VSTS) instead of Jira. Our new integration with Azure DevOps boards within your Gearset deployment process lets you attach and automatically update your Azure work items when you deploy, without having to leave the app.

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An introduction to deploying changes to Salesforce CPQ

Tom Smith on February 11th 2019

Salesforce CPQ & Billing (CPQ) is a popular package from the AppExchange. It helps your sales team create fast, accurate and professional quotes.

CPQ stands for Configure Price Quote. If you're unfamiliar with CPQ, there are plenty of resources to help you find out more, but to summarize, with CPQ a sales rep can:

• Configure the combination of products and services which suit the customer.
• Adjust the price to handle volume pricing or special discounts.
• Create and send a quote to the customer.

Unlike many other packages, CPQ configuration is stored as data, so migrating changes to CPQ between environments involves data rather than metadata deployments.

In the rest of this post, we'll look at how to deploy CPQ changes with Gearset.

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GitHub users can now create a pull request from a feature branch, without having to leave Gearset

Calvin Childs on January 29th 2019

When working with source control orgs in Gearset, it’s common to adopt a typical Git workflow for feature development and bug fixes. When work starts on a new work item, a developer or admin would create a feature branch, then iteratively make their changes and test until the feature or fix is ready, at which point the feature branch would be merged into the release version of the app via a pull request. In the latest release of Gearset, GitHub users can now create a pull request from a feature branch in just a few clicks, without having to use the GitHub UI.

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Who changed my metadata, and when?

Alex Walter on January 29th 2019

Have you ever wondered why some components in a comparison don't have changed on and changed by values in Gearset? We've certainly been asked this question a few times over the past couple of years, but some recent changes will make it a thing of the past.

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Better visibility whilst validating salesforce packages in Gearset

Matt Guy on January 25th 2019

Have you found yourself wanting to know which components in your Salesforce deployment package have failed to validate, or if any of your tests have failed before your validation concludes? We know some of you have, and after some fantastic customer feedback we decided to update the validating page behaviour within Gearset.

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Avoiding accidental data loss with when deploying custom field type changes

Catherine Bacon on January 2nd 2019

Deploying changes to the type of a custom field can be problematic, particularly when there's data in the target org. Gearset's new problem analyzer can help you out.

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Exclude records from a data deployment

Tom Smith on January 2nd 2019

You have strict guidelines around who can access your production data. Meanwhile, developers want to use production data for testing their changes. Gearset's data loader now lets you exclude records from a deployment, making it easy to fine tune a set of test data.

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What are Lightning Web Components, and how will they make my life better?

Oli Lane on December 19th 2018

It’s almost that time of the year again - the Spring ‘19 release is upon us!

There’s loads of goodies coming our way, but one of the most exciting for developers is the release of Lightning Web Components. It’s a new programming model for Lightning component development, built on top of cutting-edge web technologies - and we think it’s going to bring a wealth of benefits to Salesforce developers.

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Gearset’s Hillside Hackathon - the full story

Ellis Toms on December 18th 2018

Several weeks ago, 8 members of the Gearset team set off to a secluded cottage (albeit a very big one) located in the beautiful Berkshire countryside, for a week long hackathon.

You may have already heard about this through our previous blog post or from some of our tweets, but in case you haven’t - the Hillside Hackathon project was about a small team of us getting away from the usual hustle and bustle of current projects and user requests we work on in our everyday work lives. We wanted to step away from the usual distractions, take a fresh look at some of the problems our users are facing, and put some new ideas together for exciting ways to solve them.

So that’s what we did. 5 developers, 2 designers and a marketer (myself) hid ourselves away for a week with the aim to spike and prototype a new product feature. We weren’t entirely sure on just how much we’d be able to achieve in just 5 days, but we were all ready to give it our best shot nonetheless.

We’ve decided to not share exactly what it was that we were working on during the hackathon just yet, but we can say that the project was a complete success, with the team producing an awesome, very functional prototype in just 5 short days. Check out the highlights of the week in the video below, and keep reading for the full account.

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Repeatable data deployments with data deployment templates in Gearset

Tom Smith on December 4th 2018

With Gearset's data loader you can deploy test data between your orgs. That testing becomes much more effective when you're confident about what data you're using for your tests.

Our new data deployment templates let you save and re-use the configuration after a data deployment. Re-using a configuration lets you perform repeatable data deployments, so you can be sure of the data that you're testing with.

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Our new whitepaper - Adopting Salesforce DX: get your team ready for the future of DevOps

Matt Dickens on November 27th 2018

At Dreamforce in late 2016, we were asked a lot of questions about what we thought of Salesforce DX, following its public announcement. It feels like a lifetime ago, but way back then, we put together a post documenting our thoughts on SFDX - what it was, who it was for, and what it means for the future of ALM on the platform. We also talked about what it means for third-parties like Gearset building DevOps tools for Salesforce.

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Updates to the problem analysis results page

Catherine Bacon on November 20th 2018

One of Gearset's core strengths is its understanding of your metadata. If you've used Gearset before, you'll have no doubt encountered one of our problem analyzers when deploying changes, offering to fix up a deployment package to help your deployment run successfully first time. In the latest release, we've made some changes to the problem analysis results to reduce clutter and improve the wording, making it more clear what changes each problem analyzer will make to your deployment package.

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Hillside Hackathon - the beginning

Ellis Toms on November 19th 2018

As the name “Hillside Hackathon” may suggest, some of the Gearset team have embarked upon an epic journey of feature exploration in the beautiful British countryside. It might not sound quite as epic as trailblazing up a mountain, but the UK’s countryside is a little more quaint than that on the other side of the pond!

In short; we're doing a one-week hackathon in the quiet hills of Berkshire.

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Managed packages, v43, and activateRSS

Alex Walter on November 13th 2018

With summer '18, Salesforce introduced a potential bug with the way managed packages are retrieved and deployed via the metadata API. If you've seen the error Required field is missing: activateRSS when deploying the InstalledPackage type via the metadata API, then this article is for you.

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How to deploy flows in v44

Catherine Bacon on November 9th 2018

In the Winter '19 release (v44 of the metadata API), Salesforce made several changes to how flows work. There are some important changes to how this type of metadata should be deployed - read on to find out more about working with them in the latest release.

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Deploy your data to Salesforce production orgs

Tom Smith on November 7th 2018

When we first launched our Salesforce data loader, you could migrate records between Salesforce environments for testing purposes only. We didn’t allow you to deploy data to production orgs so as to help you avoid overwriting your production data by mistake. This being said, as a Salesforce admin there are a number of cases where you'll need to deploy data to your production orgs, like when you’re implementing Salesforce CPQ.

To help our customers in these use cases, we’ve now added the ability to deploy data to your production environments. But to help you avoid mistakes and ensure you deploy cautiously, we’ve added additional warnings as there is no deployment rollback for data deployments - we won’t be able to recover any data lost!

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Dreamforce 2018 highlights

Ellis Toms on October 12th 2018

Another Dreamforce has come and gone in a crazy blur, and what a fantastic week it was! With the beautiful San Francisco as our backdrop, we joined the other 170,000 Salesforce professionals for an electric week of innovation, excitement, and inspiration at Dreamforce 2018. Gearset had an amazing time throughout the conference, soaking up the Salesforce Ohana spirit, talking to inspiring trailblazers, and of course, showcasing our leading DevOps solution for Salesforce. Take a look at some of our highlights from Dreamforce 18, and carry on reading to find out what else we got up to.

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Deployment notes are now automatically copied across when cloning or combining packages

Ellis Toms on September 19th 2018

Deployment notes, alongside your deployment report, make it simple to see not only what changes were made to your Salesforce orgs, but why changes were made. Either compulsory or optional, deployment notes are essential for tracking every deployment your team makes, as well as ensuring your team can understand the reason behind them.

To make sure your team can easily keep providing the essential context of their Salesforce deployments, Gearset now copies across any deployment notes when you clone or combine deployment packages, so you don’t have to!

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Writing an open source Apex syntax highlighter for the Monaco editor

Oli Lane on September 3rd 2018

Microsoft's VSCode has come along leaps and bounds in the last couple of years, both in functionality and popularity. One of my favourite things about it is that it's open source, which means that not only can you check out the source code for yourself, you can contribute, too!

At its core, VSCode is powered by the Monaco editor, which handles all of the code editing functionality. Since it's all built on top of browser technology, it's actually possible to use the Monaco editor by itself inside a browser - and in fact, that's exactly what we do to render most of our code and XML diffs within Gearset.

Monaco handles things like diff rendering, quick navigation and syntax highlighting for you, but when it came to displaying Apex diffs, there was no Apex syntax highlighter available. Since Java and Apex are syntactically pretty similar, we got away with using the inbuilt Java syntax highlighting for a little while, but we wanted to both improve our product and give back to the open source community that helps build this fantastic editor. So, I decided to take a stab at writing an Apex syntax highlighter and contributing it back to the project.

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Combine multiple deployments into one single deployment package

Ellis Toms on August 16th 2018

Long ago, we waved goodbye to the pain of converting inbound change sets to outbound change sets with Gearset’s clone package feature. With a click of a button, you could promote successful changes to the next environment in your release pipeline. While this was, and still is, a huge time-saver, if you wanted to migrate changes from multiple deployments, you’d have to clone each in turn, or start from scratch with a fresh comparison.

To do away with this repetition and speed up your release cycle, Gearset now lets you combine multiple deployments into a single package.

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Create fully configured SFDX scratch orgs from existing definition files

Ellis Toms on July 31st 2018

In the age of Salesforce DX, the way we build on the Salesforce platform is changing. Part of that change includes the welcoming of scratch orgs into our development process. Scratch orgs are one of the most exciting features to come out of SFDX; they’re clean, ephemeral environments that you can spin up to build packages and test deployments ahead of time, without the worry of maintaining the environment.

Dedicated to bringing the benefits of DX to admins as well as developers, back in November we added the ability to create a scratch org in Gearset with just one click. Then more recently we released an update that allows you to choose the expiry period of your scratch orgs too, all with the ease of clicks-not-code.

But there's always room for improvement. Creating scratch orgs and setting their expiry period is a great starting point, but there are lots more configuration options when creating a scratch org. To make this feature useful to DevOps teams, we need to support the full breadth of configuration options from Gearset's UI, without having to touch the command line.

Gearset’s latest beta does just that, letting you create scratch orgs from any existing definition files and configure general settings, without having to resort to using the CLI. This means you can create highly tailored scratch orgs in a matter of clicks and integrate them seamlessly with Gearset’s existing comparison and deployment features.

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With great power comes great responsibility: team owners can now manage team members' automation jobs

Ellis Toms on July 26th 2018

Until recently only the person who created a CI, change monitor or test monitor job could edit, disable or delete it. This was fine most of the time but what if that person was on vacation for two weeks and their CI job needed to be paused or edited? Or you want to add your team’s email address to the notification settings of every change monitoring job? As a team owner you wouldn’t be able to do these things, instead you’d have to reach out to us to help you make these changes.

But now, to help with these types of scenario we’ve added extra powers to team owners, giving them greater control and flexibility over managing their team’s automation jobs.

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Gearset’s static code analysis now runs on PMD 6.3.0

Ellis Toms on July 12th 2018

Gearset’s PMD-based static code analysis has been running on Enterprise users’ deployments and backups since the start of 2018, helping improve Apex code standards across Salesforce development teams.

We’ve recently upgraded the version of PMD our static code analysis is built on, from 5.8.1 to 6.3.0. In this upgrade PMD fixed a few bugs but also added some useful and exciting functionality that you can take advantage of with Gearset. The new version brings the ability to suppress Apex code warnings, as well as 16 new rules, giving you more power to tailor your rule set to your needs.

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Creating Salesforce CLI plugins for extra SFDX goodness

Kevin Boyle on June 29th 2018

At Gearset we’ve stayed on the cutting edge of DevOps on the Salesforce platform by taking advantage of the new APIs that Salesforce gives us in each release. With the release of Summer ‘18 I had a go at writing a plugin for the Salesforce CLI (sfdx) to expose the new Metadata Coverage report in the terminal.

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Adding regex patterns to object-level metadata filters

Ellis Toms on June 28th 2018

Every deployment in Gearset starts with a comparison between two environments, whether they’re Salesforce organisations or metadata stored in a git repo. Being able to compare the metadata between two environments has lots of advantages, one of the most important being the ability to quickly get an overview of all the ways in which they differ, and selectively deploy changes.

That said, we’ve all had the dubious pleasure of working with environments that have diverged more significantly than we’d like, whether it’s due to teams working on features for the same org, a sandbox that hasn’t been refreshed in a long while or inheriting less-than-perfect legacy orgs. This can result in comparisons between orgs with thousands of differences, making it difficult to discern the changes you’re interested in deploying. It can also result in longer comparison times, as all of that metadata needs to be retrieved from Salesforce before it can be compared.

We want to make configuring your comparisons and deployments as fast and easy as possible. So to help mitigate this problem, we’ve expanded on the ways you pick which metadata Gearset compares for you. Until today, the granularity of Gearset’s filtering was limited to either a whole metadata type, e.g. CustomObject, or specific named items within that type, e.g. Account. With the latest release, we’ve added the ability for users to add regex patterns to object-level filters and the option to specify items that they want to exclude from the comparison, speeding up deployment configuration and making it easier to ensure you’re only seeing the metadata you’re interested in.

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Get prepared for Salesforce DX with our guide to version control for Salesforce

Jason Mann on June 14th 2018

Source-driven development is at the heart of modern Salesforce release management. Shifting the source of truth from the org to version control is the foundation on which DX is built, vital for letting developers build collaboratively and deliver continuously.

If you or your team are looking to harness the full power of Salesforce DX, make sure you have your version control strategy in place before you get started.

We can help you do just that with our practical guide to implementing git-based release management. In our whitepaper we examine how version control works, the benefits of version control over in-org development, and introduce a best-practice model for adopting version control in your business.

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Guest posting with Gearset: share your experience with the Salesforce community

Ellis Toms on May 30th 2018

One of the best things about Salesforce is the community. I really believe it’s what makes Salesforce much more than just a business.

Before joining Gearset and the world of Salesforce I’d never been involved with such an engaging community, full of vibrant, intelligent people who are genuinely passionate about what they do, and keen to share their hard-earned knowledge. This community spirit rings out across the whole Salesforce ecosystem, evident through the thousands of meetups held all over the world, at conferences, in stack overflow threads, and in numerous blog posts across the web.

By attending Salesforce events and meetups, as well as talking to our customers and members of the community, Gearset knows first-hand how valuable it is hearing about other people’s experiences. It’s because of this that we’re inviting anyone who has a great idea, tip, trick or Salesforce hack to come and share their ideas and become a guest poster with Gearset.

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Automatically identify dependencies in Apex classes and triggers

Ellis Toms on May 30th 2018

Missing dependencies are one of the greatest pain points for Salesforce admins and developers - they block deployments, take hours to track down, and can involve a lot of manual XML editing. Gearset's problem analyzers scan your metadata and automatically identify and resolve these missing dependencies for you, making deployments a breeze.

With our latest update, Gearset now understands and resolves dependencies within Apex classes and triggers. Referencing a new object in your Apex class? We'll spot it and make sure it gets included in your release. Does that new object have related profile and field level security changes? You can include those with just a click. The result is faster, smoother deployments and happier end users.

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Add outgoing webhooks to a CI job and Gearset will automatically post to any third party app

Ellis Toms on May 16th 2018

Gearset's built-in continuous integration (CI) is already a powerful tool, allowing you to automate large parts of your release management process. But what if you need to trigger third-party services as part of your release process, to run Selenium tests for example? Until now, this had been a manual process; when the CI job finished in Gearset, you had to remember to kick off those Selenium tests.

With the latest release of Gearset, we've introduced the ability to add outgoing webhooks to your CI jobs. Any service with an API can now be triggered directly from within Gearset, letting you build a deployment pipeline tailored to the needs of your business.

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Gearset now uses API version 42 as default for Git repositories

Ellis Toms on April 26th 2018

As we've discussed in previous posts, choosing which metadata API version to use when storing your metadata in git requires some thought. If you've ever seen errors like: Property 'valueSet' not valid in version 37.0 or Not available for deploy for this API version, then you know what we're talking about.

With Gearset, you can avoid the pain of deployment failures and fixing version mismatches through our intelligent handling of API versioning. When using source control as the source or target of a comparison, behind the scenes Gearset is taking the contents of that repository and running checks to determine the version of the metadata inside. Gearset has recently improved this handling, running even better checks to determine which API was used to generate the existing repository, and when an API version is not detected, Gearset will now default to version 42 rather than version 37. With this new default, anybody creating a new repository with Gearset will always have the latest and greatest metadata.

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Changes to Gearset's static IP addresses

Jason Mann on April 25th 2018

From the 2nd May 2018, as part of a planned upgrade to our service infrastructure, Gearset requests will begin originating from additional IP addresses. If you're using IP whitelisting, you may need to update your lists to accommodate the changes.

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Gearset’s Salesforce data deployer is now out of beta!

Ellis Toms on April 16th 2018

Gearset’s data loader has evolved significantly over the past few months. With the added ability to filter objects by field value when you deploy, pick which dependencies to deploy as well as customize field mapping for upserting records, your Salesforce data deployments are now even easier. Based on these developments, we’re happy to announce that our data support is now out of beta!

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TrailheaDX ‘18 highlights

Ellis Toms on April 5th 2018

After a whirlwind few days, the Gearset team is back from the epic-ness that was TrailheaDX ‘18, the biggest Salesforce developer conference in the world. Between the 11,000 miles travelled, hundreds of product demos and two hugely popular presentations, the team had a very tiring, but rewarding few days!

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New dependency support for deploying flows

Ellis Toms on April 4th 2018

Dependencies between objects are one of the most common causes of failed Salesforce deployments and finding missing dependencies can be seriously time-consuming and frustrating. But with Gearset’s dependency tracking, our users have been able to eliminate the trial and error from deployments so you can deploy quickly, confidently and successfully.

Over the past two years we’ve been steadily adding support for more and more dependencies, based on our telemetry and user feedback. Our latest addition is dependency support for flows.

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App update: a new design for Gearset

Ellis Toms on March 29th 2018

As Gearset has continuously evolved, it’s become increasingly difficult to display all the app’s new release management features. So to make it easier for our users to navigate around the Gearset app, the navigation bar and menu have been given a fresh, new design! The new menu design will not only help our customers navigate between pages more quickly but will also make it easier to see all of the features Gearset has to offer.

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Gearset’s data deployments are coming out of beta

Ellis Toms on March 27th 2018

Since we introduced our data deployment beta, the Gearset team have been working hard based on user feedback to develop a data deployment tool that delivers quick, easy and successful Salesforce data deployments.

Over the past several months, our data deployer has evolved significantly to make your data deployments even easier and faster. The added ability to filter objects by field value when you deploy, pick which dependencies to deploy as well as customizable field mapping for upserting records are just some of the ways Gearset has been developing this feature to provide tailored, reliable data deployments.

Based on these significant developments, we’re happy to announce that data support will be coming out of beta from the 16th of April! This means that you have a few weeks to keep enjoying data deployments for free before they become an add-on purchase to your team’s Gearset subscription (as of April 16th).

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Salesforce release management for higher education: webinar recording

Ellis Toms on March 21st 2018

Gearset’s higher education webinar explores how to tackle some of the real-world release management challenges faced by higher education institutions, and how Gearset can help streamline their release management.

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You can now create validation-only CI jobs in Gearset

Ellis Toms on March 20th 2018

Gearset’s easy end-to-end continuous integration (CI) process already ensures our users all the benefits of reliable continuous delivery, without the need for external software like Jenkins.

Now within Gearset, if you're an Enterprise-tier user you can set up validation-only CI jobs between any of your Salesforce orgs, so you can catch any problematic changes early and make sure that when the time comes to deploy, you’ll be able to release successfully.

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Data deployment update: Pick which dependencies to deploy and what field to use for upserting records

Ellis Toms on March 15th 2018

With a customisable test data set, automatic relationship handling and control over field mapping and upserting, Gearset makes it easy to execute complex data deployments. All you have to do is pick the records you want to deploy and Gearset will handle the rest.

Gearset’s latest updates to our data deployment (beta) feature includes a new step between configuration and the deployment plan, where you can select which dependencies to deploy and customize field mapping for upserting records. With this easy deployment configuration and our “clicks-not-code” philosophy, Gearset allows you to migrate your data between your Salesforce environments in a matter of minutes, giving you more time to focus on your actual release.

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Feature update: Static code analysis now runs during your Continuous Integration jobs

Ellis Toms on March 14th 2018

Gearset’s customizable static code analysis helps teams develop high quality coding standards that fit their release process. As well as running during manual deployments and in change monitoring jobs, Gearset’s static code analysis now also automatically runs as part of your Continuous Integration (CI) jobs.

Configure your rule set and Gearset will automatically perform your code analysis every time a CI job runs, making it easy to manage the quality and style of your Apex and ensure problems are caught early for all of your continuous deployments.

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Feature update: Static code analysis now runs during manual Gearset deployments

Ellis Toms on March 7th 2018

Gearset’s static code analysis now also runs alongside the problem analyzers during manual deployments, as well during change monitoring jobs. This gives you and your team feedback on the quality and style of your code prior to release, helping reduce bugs and reinforcing best-practice coding standards.

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Deploy your data to Salesforce DX scratch orgs

Ellis Toms on March 2nd 2018

Gearset’s integration with Salesforce DX (SFDX) scratch orgs empowers devs and admins alike to harness the power of DX, without the command line. With Gearset it's easy to create new scratch orgs, deploy your metadata to build the org structure, and then populate them with data as part of an Agile release process.

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Webinar: Release management for higher education

Jason Mann on February 22nd 2018

Join Gearset on Tuesday 13th March 5pm at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 5pm GMT for our webinar exploring how Gearset can help higher education institutes simplify and expedite their release management.

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Set your own coding standards with customizable static code analysis settings

Ellis Toms on February 7th 2018

Gearset’s static code analysis already helps you write high quality, easily maintainable Apex code. Now, with customisable static code analysis rule sets, you can easily keep on top of what matters, helping you catch any bugs early and ensure that your team is consistently writing effective, safe Apex.

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Jira update: post deployment notes as comments to your Jira tickets

Ellis Toms on February 5th 2018

With Gearset’s Jira integration (Jira Self-hosted and Jira Cloud) you can effortlessly add Jira tickets to your deployment. Gearset automatically posts deployment updates to your tickets so you can see all the changes your team are making, keep up-to-date with the progress of tickets, and approve releases more efficiently.

With the latest release, any deployment notes you attach will be included in both the deployment report and within the comments posted to your Jira tickets, allowing you to easily track every change that has been made and understand the context of why they have been made. Additionally, Gearset will now display any attached Jira tickets within your deployment reports for a clear and robust audit trail.

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Jira update: support for Jira Self-hosted (on-prem) instance

Ellis Toms on January 18th 2018

Gearset’s integration with Jira lets you automatically post deployment updates to your tickets and keep up-to-date with the progress of your user stories. Gearset now supports Jira Self-hosted (on-prem) as an instance type, as well as the default Jira Cloud instance.

You can now also search and select which Jira ticket you’d like to add to your validation or deployment package from a dropdown list, rather than add your ticket reference manually.

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Keep a complete record of every change made with the new option for compulsory deployment notes

Ellis Toms on January 12th 2018

With a full deployment history, deployment notes and integration with Jira, Gearset already makes it simple to maintain a record of exactly what has changed across your Salesforce orgs and why.

Now team owners have the ability to make deployment notes compulsory, so you can easily meet your compliance needs around deployment tracking and ensure that any changes, and the reasons for those changes, are clearly recorded and understood.

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User permissions reporting (beta) - see who can read and edit fields across your Salesforce orgs

Ellis Toms on January 10th 2018

We know how tricky it can be to keep track of the hundreds of profiles and permission sets in your Salesforce orgs, not to mention all the different levels of access they collectively create. Assigning a user the wrong permissions is potentially very dangerous, so it’s crucial to monitor who has access to sensitive data.

With Gearset, we’ve made it simple to understand and keep track of your user access control. Explore and report on which profiles and permission sets have been applied across objects and fields with our permissions reporting (beta).

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Gearset’s session videos for Dreamforce 2017

Ellis Toms on December 18th 2017

If you were able to attend Dreamforce ‘17 you’d have experienced first-hand what an exhilarating week of thought-provoking sessions and inspiring keynotes it was.

We had an absolutely fantastic week engaging with the Salesforce community, meeting so many enthusiastic people and demonstrating our Salesforce release management solution. On top of this, we were also thrilled to present 3 talks during the week.

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The entity: {object} does not have feeds enabled

Oli Lane on December 13th 2017

Salesforce’s support for Chatter feed tracking means that your users can be notified when certain objects they follow are updated. This makes it easy to see what’s changing in those objects directly inside your Chatter feed.

Unfortunately, there are a couple of pitfalls when deploying Chatter feed tracking settings between Salesforce environments, and the most common is the error message:

The entity: {object} does not have feeds enabled

Gearset now has the ability to work around this deployment error for you, and detect it before you even try to deploy the changes.

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Integrating Gearset with Jira for seamless user story tracking

Ellis Toms on December 11th 2017

Gearset's Jira integration makes it easy to automatically post deployment updates to your tickets and track user story progress.

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Gearset and SFDX scratch orgs: harness the power of DX, without the command line

Ellis Toms on December 8th 2017

At Gearset, we strive to constantly develop powerful new features that can be used by both developers and admins alike. Gearset now fully supports the new scratch orgs introduced by Salesforce DX (SFDX). You can create, compare and deploy to SFDX scratch orgs in Gearset to easily configure clean environments for building packages and testing.

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Improve the quality, performance and security of your code with Gearset’s static code analysis

Ellis Toms on November 28th 2017

To ensure that you are writing high quality, easily maintainable Apex code, it's important that you follow a few best practices in terms of code structure and content. With our latest release, Gearset now automatically performs static code analysis on the Apex in your orgs, helping you write higher quality and more effective code and ultimately speed up release cycles.

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An easier way to view failed deployments and validations with Gearset

Ellis Toms on November 18th 2017

Gearset has always endeavoured to increase the visibility users have into their Salesforce environments. As well as a complete history of successful deployments and validations, you can now view in-progress and failed deployments from the deployment history page as well as see which validations have failed under the validated packages page. Finding and fixing deployment issues is now faster and easier than ever.

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Dreamforce 2017 round-up

Ellis Toms on November 15th 2017

Dreamforce is over for another year! With 170,000+ attendees, thousands of innovative breakout sessions and inspiring keynotes from Salesforce’s CEO Marc Benioff and ex-First Lady Michelle Obama, Dreamforce 2017 truly was an incredible experience.

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Working around the Custom Metadata Unknown_Exception issue in Salesforce

Catherine Bacon on October 26th 2017

One of our users ran into an unusual issue while running a seemingly innocent comparison. When comparing two Salesforce orgs to see the difference between them, Salesforce returned a cryptic error message: Unexpected_Exception: An unexpected error occurred.

Generic error messages like this can me hard to deal with as they give you very little information to work with (as anyone who uses Ant will know). Gearset is all about surfacing and solving deployment issues, so we decided to investigate and find the underlying cause of the error. Thanks to some great feedback from the user in question, we managed to narrow down the cause of this error to very specific scenarios related to Custom Metadata and managed packages. We've updated Gearset so it'll suggest how to work around them more automatically.

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Creating branches in your version control system with Gearset

Ellis Toms on October 10th 2017

With Gearset, managing the metadata in your version control system is ingeniously simple. Compare environments, create new branches and commit changes, all from within the app.

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See the results of your Salesforce org tests on your desktop with Gearset’s CruiseControl integration

Ellis Toms on October 3rd 2017

Have you ever found that your tests have been silently failing, only discovering them when you tried to deploy? Gearset’s test automation makes it easy to track test status across all your orgs and get notified when things start to go wrong.

As part of Gearset’s ongoing effort to increase the visibility teams have into their Salesforce environments, we have recently extended our test automation to integrate with CruiseControl. The result? See the status of your org tests right on your desktop.

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Comparing configuration changes between your environments just got easier

Ellis Toms on September 22nd 2017

Gearset has always strived to make it simple to see the differences between your environments. With our updated diff viewer, comparing and understanding your configuration changes is even easier.

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Deploying LeadConvertSettings with Gearset

Ellis Toms on September 12th 2017

Gearset makes deploying your Salesforce metadata ingeniously simple by giving you a visual comparison between your orgs before you deploy your changes. From Profiles, to Custom Objects, to LeadConvertSettings, Gearset can help speed up your deployments and automate those slow, manual tasks.

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Gearset and Einstein analytics: deploy Wave datasets, Wave applications, and Wave dashboards with ease

Jason Mann on September 6th 2017

With Gearset you can easily migrate your Salesforce Einstein analytics settings between your orgs. Creating dashboards in your sandbox and deploying them out into production has never been easier!

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Fine-tune your org comparisons with advanced metadata filters

Jason Mann on September 1st 2017

Gearset’s custom metadata filters have just got more powerful. You can now fine-tune your filters to specify exactly which items you’d like to compare before you run a comparison. The result? Faster comparisons which show you exactly what you’re interested in deploying, and nothing else.

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Feature update: data deployment beta now available

Stephen Chambers on July 27th 2017

Data deployment is one of the major features on our product roadmap for 2017 (with the usual safe harbor caveats in place). We've previously written about what we plan to deliver when it comes to data support. The short version is that we're adding support for the ability to generate data samples for the the purposes of debugging and testing. This deals with scenarios such as choosing specific records from standard and custom objects to enable debugging and testing (e.g. three account records and related records).

We now feel that there's now enough basic functionality in place to release what we currently have as an early beta.

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Deploying Salesforce communities via the metadata API

Matt Dickens on July 24th 2017

We're all agreed that deploying Salesforce communities can be fairly tricky. If the following errors are familiar to you, read on:

• In field: indexPage - no ApexPage named CommunitiesLanding found
• In field: siteAdmin - no User named [email protected] found
• In field: Network - no Network named Gearset found
• In field: Site - no CustomSite named Gearset found

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Feature update: custom metadata filters are now shared with your team

Jason Mann on July 14th 2017

Custom metadata filters are a powerful way to optimise your workflow with Gearset. With a custom filter you can choose which metadata is retrived from Salesforce, speeding up comparisons between your orgs and making it easier to find the changes you're interested in deploying.

Until now, these filters were unique to each user. With the latest release, custom filters are now shared amongst teams, making it easier for teams to collaborate and ensure they're all using the same filters for their deployments.

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Migrating quick fixes in Salesforce to source control

Stephen Chambers on June 29th 2017

Salesforce allows development teams to respond to changes in business requirements much more quickly than traditional platforms such as SQL Server or Oracle. When the need arises, the whole team, and especially admins, can make changes directly in the production org, bypassing the normal software development lifecycle.

However, organisations adopt a software development lifecycle and Agile practices for a reason! Changes made directly in the org can often be overwritten at a later date by a scheduled deployment, or not get the proper scrutiny they deserve. Gearset's change monitoring has helped thousands of organisations track changes made directly in their orgs and bring them back into the development team's natural rhythm.

With a recent release, we've extended this feature to make it possible to take changes that Gearset detected and move them directly to another org, such as downstream QA or development, or even push them through to your version control system.

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Version control and metadata API versions

Matt Dickens on June 22nd 2017

Back at the start of the year, we wrote a post about Gearset intelligently handling API versioning so that you don't have to. We explained that Gearset will automatically pick the highest commonly-supported version between source and target and use that by default, while still allowing you to specify an overriding version, should you need to.

As for version control repositories, Gearset treated these as containing version 37 metadata unless you applied the version override. This worked well enough, but came with the additional burden of having to pick an API version to use for each comparison when comparing to a source control repository containing anything other than version 37 metadata. In a recent change, we've made Gearset smarter when comparing to version control and uploaded metadata zips.

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New alerting features in Gearset's Salesforce metadata monitoring

Kevin Boyle on June 22nd 2017

The flexibility of the Salesforce platform encourages change, allowing power users, admins and developers to easily tweak things as needed. As a company that builds a release management service, we encourage people to follow good development practices and ensure that changes are properly documented and audited so you can understand later why they were made! However, forcing every change through a software development lifecycle, even an Agile one, would be sacrificing the power of the platform and the clicks-not-code culture that allows organisations to make rapid change to their orgs as the business requires. After all, adding a simple picklist value doesn't carry the same risk as 10,000 new lines of Apex or addition of AppExchange packages.

So how do you ensure that changes made directly in production by admins and power users aren't forgotten about and are properly captured and audited? That's where Gearset's change monitoring comes in. This was the first feature that we added to Gearset Enterprise, and it's now trusted by thousands of businesses to allow their Salesforce teams to properly capture every change, without compromising their ability to blaze a trail.

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Tracking Salesforce metadata changes in AWS CodeCommit

Kevin Boyle on June 19th 2017

You can find an updated guide on using Gearset with AWS CodeCommit here.

Amazon Web Services, commonly known as AWS, powers vast swathes of the internet. The rock solid security and reliability explain why even Salesforce have entered into a partnership and deploy several Salesforce clouds inside AWS data centers.

One of the services that AWS offers is git repository hosting, branded as AWS CodeCommit. AWS CodeCommit offers git hosting that is tied into the authentication and user management features of the AWS platform so works great for teams that are already invested into the ecosystem.

Gearset now has first class support for AWS CodeCommit as a way to track changes to your Salesforce metadata and this article walks you through how to get started.

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How to temporarily disable continuous integration jobs in Gearset

Stephen Chambers on June 8th 2017

Gearset's continuous integration feature set has been evolving rapidly to better support mature application lifecycle management. This evolution has continued with our increased support for version control providers. Since we first added CI functionality to Gearset, with standard GitHub and Bitbucket version control included, we also now support GitLab, GitHub Enterprise, and more recently taken a huge leap forward to support any git-based source control repository to which Gearset has access.

With our latest release, we've now added the ability to pause a currently active CI job. Disabling a CI job may seem a little counter intuitive, but does make sense for certain scenarios. Firstly, you may not want a CI job to start deploying changes at the same time as hotfixes or ad-hoc changes to the same target org are taking place. To help prevent potential conflicts, the CI job can now be paused, the ad-hoc changes can be safely deployed to production and the CI job can be reactivated when safe to do so. Alternatively, you may want to simply set up the CI job in advance, but not have it run until other parts of the overall process have been completed.

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More flexible team management in Gearset

Stephen Chambers on May 25th 2017

We're continually adding new features to Gearset with the goal of simplifying Salesforce release management for everyone, irrespective of job role and responsibilities. These can range from new standalone features, to the ongoing iteration and gradual enhancement of existing features driven primarily by user feedback.

One of the most popular requests has been to improve the existing team management functionality in Gearset.

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Feature update: migrating Salesforce data with Gearset

Stephen Chambers on May 11th 2017

One of the major features listed in our roadmap for 2017, with the usual safe harbor statements firmly in place, is adding data support to Gearset. We thought now would be a good opportunity to give you an update as to where we are, and the decisions that we've made.

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Ignoring an existing package.xml file when comparing metadata from a version controlled repository

Stephen Chambers on May 9th 2017

When performing a comparison between metadata stored in a version controlled repository against either a target Salesforce org or another repository, we occasionally get questions about why some expected metadata differences don't appear in the comparison results.

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Deploy Salesforce metadata to almost any source control repository

Jason Mann on April 19th 2017

Gearset has supported integration with source control via OAuth for some time. With our latest release, you can now add connections to any custom git-based repository using a username/password connection. If it’s accessible to our app, you can deploy to it!

To add a new git connection, head to the manage orgs page and click Add new git repository.

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Create custom schedules for your Salesforce test jobs

Oli Lane on April 6th 2017

Gearset's free test runner just got a little bit smarter. Starting today, you can select what time of day your tests should run, so that you can avoid conflicts with other scheduled jobs running in the org and make sure no development is happening while the tests run.

To use the new time picker, just head to the test monitoring page and click Add new job, or edit one of your existing jobs.

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Reduce noise when migrating Salesforce managed packages using Gearset

Oli Lane on March 20th 2017

Gearset is already great for migrating changes to managed packages, but one problem that customers sometimes run into is noise in the comparison viewer. If you've got lots of managed packages installed in your Salesforce orgs, it can be tricky to find the components you actually want to migrate, even with Gearset's advanced filtering capabilities. To make matters worse, your comparison times can be made significantly longer because Gearset has to download all that extra metadata from Salesforce.

To address this problem, last week we introduced some extra filtering options that you can apply to your Gearset comparisons. You can now specify a list of managed package namespaces to include in your comparison, rather than simply including all or none of the packages. This means that Gearset no longer needs to download metadata from packages that you're not interested in, and your comparison is no longer cluttered up with it - leaving you free to focus in on the components you care about.

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Migrating customizations to Salesforce Managed Packages using Gearset

Andrew Hunter on March 17th 2017

When a managed package is installed into a Salesforce organization, that managed package can augment the organization with new metadata such as CustomObjects or by making modifications to existing metadata such as adding a new CustomField to a standard object. These modifications can be an issue when dealing with a traditional deployment tool like Ant, as all of this extra metadata will now be mixed in with your existing metadata.

It’s possible to ignore this metadata altogether, but this can be an issue as it’s possible that you will customize some of it after installation, adding new fields that model your quoting process for example. Without careful tracking, it’s very hard to tell apart the metadata that the package installed from the customisations that you made to the package’s metadata.

Gearset provides a solution to both these problems.

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How to deploy Salesforce Record Types

Jason Mann on February 28th 2017

We’ve recently noticed that more users are having issues deploying Record Types to Salesforce. This type of metadata has always been a bit tricky to deploy, and the introduction of Global Value Sets in Winter ‘17 has added a new variable to the mix.

We’ve recently been improving Gearset’s dependency and problem analysis engine to help deal with some of the challenges of deploying record types and picklist fields.

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Gearset's roadmap for Q1/Q2 2017

Matt Dickens on February 14th 2017

TL;DR: In the first half of this year we’ll be focusing on:

• A small number of substantial new features
• Lots of incremental additions, usability enhancements and polish to existing features
• Making your deployments successful with improvements to our dependency and problem analysis

Gearset exists because migrating changes between Salesforce orgs is difficult. There are often a lot of error-prone manual steps and tedious iteration when making a deployment from one org to another. As your environments grow in number and complexity, so does the margin for error, introducing more esoteric dependencies and failure cases. By the time you add source control into the mix, you're dealing with the idiosyncrasies of the metadata API, versioning issues and lots of raw XML.

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Back up your Salesforce metadata on-demand with change monitoring

Oli Lane on January 26th 2017

Gearset’s change monitoring feature gives you confidence that any changes made directly in your production instances will be easily detected and captured, so that you can propagate those changes back to development and staging environments and make sure they don’t get lost. Even better, if you discover some unexpected changes that you’d prefer got lost, Gearset offers simple, instant rollback to reverse those changes.

The change monitoring feature also doubles as a backup tool. For any change monitoring job, you can view a list of every daily snapshot Gearset has taken, and download a copy the metadata as it was on that day.

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Property 'valueSet' not valid in version 37.0 - versioning and the mdapi

Matt Dickens on January 3rd 2017

If you've worked with the Salesforce metadata API for any period of time, you've probably seen a message along these lines:

Property 'valueSet' not valid in version 37.0 - versioning and the mdapi

This sort of error is likely fairly familiar to those teams opting to source control their metadata. The details my differ slightly, but the outcome is the same - a mismatched API version has caused a failed deployment by trying to push metadata that was retrieved using a newer version to an older version of the API. This raises the questions - what version should you use for the metadata in your repo, and at what point should you upgrade it? Read on to hear how Gearset makes this error message a thing of the past.

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Retrieving and deploying namespaced layouts in Salesforce

Oli Lane on December 14th 2016

TL;DR: Retrieving namespaced layouts from Salesforce doesn't act quite as you might expect. Gearset now works around this quirk, so that you don't have to think about it.

Recently we received a slightly odd bug report from a user who claimed that Gearset was failing to include layouts inside namespaces in comparisons, despite the fact they had selected the Include managed packages option in the comparison filter. To add to the intrigue, the user was able to retrieve a list of the layouts using ANT, via a call to listMetadata() - this is exactly what Gearset does as its first step, so it was surprising that the layouts weren't showing up.

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Even better filtering of your Salesforce metadata

Oli Lane on December 8th 2016

One of Gearset’s best features is the ability to quickly see an overview of all the differences between two Salesforce orgs. However, if you're comparing particularly big orgs, or preparing a complex deployment, the list of changes can grow quite large.

Earlier this year we expanded our support for these scenarios with advanced filtering queries. For most cases that was enough, but some users still found that they needed more control. This week we're releasing an overhauled filtering engine which provides granular, per-column filtering to make it even easier to drill down to the changes you care about.

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Deploying standard value sets in Salesforce

Oli Lane on November 10th 2016

The Salesforce Winter ‘17 release has brought with it a whole raft of great new features and no-brainer improvements to the platform. Inevitably, a few of those changes have required some adjustments, not least of which have been the changes to the structure of picklists.

As a brief recap, many Salesforce standard objects have picklist fields - fields that allow only a restricted set of predefined values. Before Winter 17, these predefined values were stored with the field definition, but now they're stored separately. These new collections of values are called standard value sets. For example, the Type picklist on the Opportunity object now has its values stored in the OpportunityType standard value set.

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The Salesforce Admin's guide to git

Kevin Boyle on November 8th 2016

Git has taken over the world in the past few years and for many, terms like version control, git and GitHub have become synonyms. This post digs into the jargon and sheds light on how #AwesomeAdmins that don’t currently source control their work can start to realise the benefits.

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Salesforce DX - the new Salesforce developer experience

Matt Dickens on October 26th 2016

Team Gearset has returned from a fun and frenetic week at Dreamforce. As always, we had a great but exhausting time - we spoke to some of our fantastic users, we spoke to lots of people who are facing problems that Gearset might be able to help solve, we partied a lot less than we’d planned to due to aforementioned exhaustion, we tweeted some atrocious U2-related puns and we found out about all the cool new things that we can expect to see from the platform in the coming months, all to the backdrop of the world’s craziest party tech conference. One of the big talking points was Salesforce DX - Salesforce's new developer experience.

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An alternative to Change Sets when using Salesforce Professional Edition

Kevin Boyle on October 24th 2016

For smaller teams and environments, Salesforce Professional Edition is a total no-brainer. It’s competitively priced, has an amazing feature set compared with the other CRMs in its price point and puts enterprise-level CRM in the hands of SMBs. In other words, it is absolutely best-in-class. For the sales team, that is…

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Running Salesforce unit tests inside namespaces with Gearset

Oli Lane on October 22nd 2016

We’ve talked before about Salesforce testing best-practice, and why automating your unit tests is important. The free unit testing feature in Gearset will already set this automation up for you in just a few clicks, but today we’re pleased to announce an important extension to its functionality: the ability to run tests hidden behind namespaces.

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What happened to the AccountSource picklist and what the dickens is a Standard Value Set?

Kevin Boyle on October 21st 2016

We’ve left sunny California and the freneticism of Dreamforce behind us for another year and returned to the delightfully stereotypical drizzle the UK is renowned for. I might have taken time to dwell on the fact that I live in a country where rain is the norm for six months of the year were it not for excitement of the Winter ‘17 release that is now upon us!

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A better way to deploy profiles and permission sets

Andrew Hunter on October 20th 2016

Profiles and permission sets are renowned for being difficult to deploy. The thought of migrating these types of changes strikes fear into the heart of Change Sets and Ant users the world over. What is it that makes deploying these types of changes so challenging? More importantly, is there a better way?

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Too much Custom Metadata can be bad for you :)

Andrew Hunter on October 18th 2016

Last week we saw an interesting issue where a customer had trouble deploying Custom Metadata using Gearset. Gearset stopped comparing the customer’s orgs when we encountered a duplicate CustomMetadata component. How on earth did we get two CustomMetadata records with the same name?

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Turbocharge your Salesforce continuous integration jobs with GitHub webhooks

Oli Lane on October 16th 2016

Last week, we were thrilled to release one of our most anticipated features yet: built in continuous integration (CI) unlocks a whole new avenue of powerful release management possibilities. We’re not fans of resting on our laurels around here at Gearset HQ, though, so this week we’re already shipping a huge improvement to the way CI works with GitHub.

By default, CI jobs run at 4-hourly intervals, automatically syncing changes from your source to your chosen target org. That’s great, but we can do better!

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The challenges of deploying metadata between Summer '16 and Winter '17 orgs

Andrew Hunter on October 12th 2016

A few weeks ago, we began to see deployment failures occurring for users using organizations on the new Winter ‘17 API. Salesforce has introduced a lot of changes in Winter ‘17, and has made it so that the older Summer ‘16 metadata API tries to return the metadata in the older format.

In the past, we’ve been able to wait until a new version of Salesforce goes to general release before updating the API version used by Gearset, because the metadata changes have been minor and are usually available even when using the older API. The Winter ‘17 update has not been so smooth for us.

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Source control your Salesforce metadata with GitHub Enterprise and Gearset

Matt Dickens on September 29th 2016

tl;dr: Deploy metadata directly to and from GitHub Enterprise with Gearset. Read on to find out how to get started!

When making the decision to version control your metadata, one of the first things you’ll need to figure out is where to host it. There are a variety of great options out there, but one of the first that’s likely to cross your mind is GitHub. Its ubiquity in the open source community and beyond not only means that it’s an incredibly well-documented platform supporting robustly exercised collaboration workflows, but it also means that most developers you meet will have certainly heard of GitHub and probably used it; the term “pull request” has entered into everyday developer parlance.

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Collaboration, delegated Salesforce org access and compliance in Gearset

Stephen Chambers on September 28th 2016

Implementing a reliable and efficient Salesforce release management process is difficult. The main blockers to achieving this goal include factors such as Salesforce environment complexity, coordinating with remote teams in different time zones, ensuring legal compliance and having a clear audit trail of changes.

The solution to removing those blockers has now arrived with the release of our team features in Gearset. Solve collaboration headaches, control access to orgs, and keep an audit trail of what's happening throughout your Salesforce landscape. You can read the walkthrough below, or watch our team features demo to see it in action.

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Salesforce continuous integration with Gearset

Jason Mann on September 20th 2016

Continuous integration (CI) has been one of the most hotly requested features in Gearset. From keeping sandboxes in sync to pushing changes from source control to your dev org, continuous integration provides the power to streamline your releases.

We’re excited to announce that Gearset now has CI built in. Create, monitor, and track continuous integration jobs between your Salesforce orgs, and even share the results with your team. It’s all the power and intelligence of Gearset, automated.

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Release management for implementation Partners: webinar recording

Jason Mann on September 5th 2016

Watch the recording of our webinar with Vertiba, a top Salesforce implementation partner, to see how Gearset helps partners deliver world-class release management.

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Deploy metadata from a local file to a Salesforce org

Jason Mann on September 2nd 2016

Gearset gives you fine-grained control over what to include in your deployment packages, and our automatic dependency analysis helps spot missing components. But sometimes you just need run a deployment from metadata stored on your local machine, or make a few edits to a package before releasing.

The new local file support in Gearset is here to help, giving you the flexibility to run a deployment no matter where your metadata is stored, while retaining the rollback, audit history and collaboration power of Gearset.

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Deploying process builder flows and flow definitions via the metadata API

Matt Dickens on August 28th 2016

Have you ever ran into any of the following error messages whilst attempting to deploy flows and flow definitions?

• The version of the flow you're updating is active and can't be overwritten
• You can't create a flow definition directly through the API
• Invalid version number: <insert version number>
• Insufficient access rights on cross-reference id

Rest assured, you’re not alone - there’s a healthy amount of discussion around best practises for deploying flows via Ant and the metadata API in the usual corners of the internet, and deploying via Change Sets comes with its own sizeable list of recommendations and caveats. Deploying flows is tricky.

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An undo button for Salesforce metadata: Rolling back production changes

Kevin Boyle on August 8th 2016

Much of the power of Salesforce comes from quickly being able to respond to the fast changing needs of business user needs by making small changes directly in production. #AwesomeAdmins and Trailblazers everywhere can implement user requests without waiting to go through a long development and release cycle.

With Gearset’s change monitoring you can be confident that any changes made directly in production will be easily picked up and captured in your regular development and staging environments ensuring that changes aren’t lost. After all, making changes directly in production is only great if they aren’t later overwritten by another well-meaning deployment!

As more and more Salesforce developers and admins have started to use Gearset’s change monitoring, we’ve received some surprising feedback - even in well managed orgs there was a lot more happening in production than the development teams or release managers knew about.

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Release management for Implementation Partners webinar

Matt Dickens on July 28th 2016

Join us on Thursday 1st September at 9am PST / 12pm EST / 5pm BST for our joint webinar with Vertiba, a top Salesforce implementation partner, to see how Gearset helps our partners deliver world-class release management.

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Save draft deployments and collaboratively build releases with your team

Jason Mann on July 18th 2016

With Gearset, comparing orgs and creating deployment packages has never been easier. But sometimes you don’t have all the changes you want to deploy ready just yet, or you want to get input from a colleague on what to include in the release. That’s where the new draft deployments come in.

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Unpicking Salesforce dependencies: Supporting formula dependencies in Gearset

Matt Dickens on July 14th 2016

We’ve spoken before about how dependencies between objects are the most common cause of failed deployments. There are a host of different dependency types, and failing to notice that one object is dependent on another when building a deployment package is likely to cause your deployment to fail.

Thankfully, Gearset’s dependency tracking is here to help. Gearset checks for dependencies before pushing the deployment package up to Salesforce and warns you of any that are missing. Our goal is to eliminate the trial-and-error from deployment - when you click the “Deploy” button in Gearset, we want you to be confident that the deployment will succeed.

Although we don’t currently detect all types of dependency, we’ve been steadily increasing our coverage over the past 12 months guided by our telemetry and, most importantly, feedback from you. Our most recent addition is detecting dependencies in formula fields.

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Better filtering of your Salesforce metadata

Matt Dickens on June 30th 2016

One of the big advantages of Gearset is that you can see all the metadata differences between two orgs, making it easy to build a deployment package containing just the changes you need. Unfortunately, when working on a large or complex deployment, these differences can be overwhelming. For example, you might want to deploy changes specific to a particular feature while leaving others out. This could mean there are be changes you're not interested in and even whole objects that you'd like to ignore.

We've extended our filtering of comparison results by introducing two new prefixes, making it easier than ever to find the changes you're interested in.

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Sharing your Salesforce deployment history using the team features in Gearset

Stephen Chambers on June 24th 2016

Coordinating with team members to manage releases to your Salesforce environments can be one of the biggest challenges when attempting to create a robust deployment process. Clear communication to ensure everybody on the team knows who's doing what can be particularly tricky.

Not being able to easily see what changes have been made to production, when, and by whom can have serious consequences, the most common being accidentally overwriting a colleague's changes.

That's where the team features of Gearset can come to your rescue.

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Rolling back unwanted changes in a Salesforce deployment

Jason Mann on June 22nd 2016

Rolling back changes in Salesforce is difficult. Without true rollback, developers and admins must revert changes one at a time in a slow and frustrating process. All that pain goes away when you start using Gearset.

With Gearset, you can now easily roll back any deployment made through the app in a few clicks. Gearset offers the choice of reverting an entire package, or specific objects, and you can manage the whole process through our intuitive user interface.

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Gearset at TrailheaDX 2016

Jason Mann on May 26th 2016

TrailheaDX is an exciting new Salesforce developer conference in San Francisco on June 7-8. With keynotes from Marc Benioff and Steve Wozniak, it’s guaranteed to be a great way to sharpen your developer skills on the Force.com platform.

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The curious case of an ID in lookupPhoneDialogsAdditionalFields

Andrew Hunter on May 25th 2016

One of our goals at Gearset is to turn Salesforce deployments into a single-click process, or as close as we can get to that! To this end, we check every deployment for potential problems before sending it to Salesforce and offer fixes for anything that could cause your deployment to fail. The most common is detecting missing dependencies but we also fix up issues with Master-Detail fields, history tracking, profile-mismatches and many other common problems. Our problem analyzer blog post provides more detail about the issues we can automatically check for.

We’ve just added a fix for a problem that a user reported to us and it was so strange I decided to write it up so that it may help somebody in the future that comes across this problem.

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6 practical tips to improve your Salesforce testing

Jason Mann on May 20th 2016

Testing your code to ensure it’s working correctly is a core tenet of good development. Good tests protect your development investment, provide the confidence to make changes safely and quickly, and help enforce business requirements.

Writing tests that get you to the magic 75% code coverage requirement is easy, but writing great tests that help protect you as you work is a real skill. In our recent webinar, we discussed why and how we test in Salesforce, and demonstrated 6 practical tips to help you write great tests that don’t become a maintenance headache.

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Gearset at the London Salesforce World Tour

Kevin Boyle on May 18th 2016

Thousands of people are descending on the ExCeL Center in London for one of city's biggest tech events of the year and the Gearset team is excited to be there as well.

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How does Gearset compare with Change Sets?

Kevin Boyle on May 18th 2016

One of the first ways that people move changes from one Salesforce org to another is Change Sets. For developers and admins that are new to Salesforce, or have simple orgs that don’t change often, Change Sets is often enough for them to manage their deployments. However, for people dealing with more complex or frequent changes to migrate, or who work in teams, Change Sets can be too limiting. The inability to reliably migrate changes to standard objects and deploying Profiles are two common situations where Change Sets come up lacking.

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Schedule your Salesforce deployments for easy Agile release management

Jason Mann on May 12th 2016

Scheduling Salesforce deployments is a great way to streamline your release management and enable a more Agile workflow. With Gearset’s new deployment scheduling, it’s incredibly easy to test changes and release them at a time that suits you.

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Salesforce testing best practice webinar

Kevin Boyle on April 19th 2016

Salesforce is an incredibly powerful and fast-growing platform. By pioneering the Software as a Service (SaaS) model, it has enabled thousands of businesses to improve their operational efficiency and grow their sales. Businesses all over the world are building every facet of the organization on top of Salesforce from sales and CRM through to HR and service desk.

Adopting a company-wide platform is not without its challenges. Managing change and avoiding conflict in a system where end users, as well as development teams, are encouraged to edit the production environment requires discipline to prevent bugs from being introduced. Having really great tests protect developers and admins as they work, and provides the confidence to make changes safely and quickly.

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Deploying feature branches of your Salesforce metadata

Stephen Chambers on April 18th 2016

Our support for GitLab and GitHub has provided flexibility for people to use their existing source control solutions to compare and easily migrate Salesforce metadata changes.

There has been one additional feature that's been missing from our initial support of the source control story, and that's been providing the ability to compare Salesforce metadata from a specific branch within a repository, often implemented when using a feature Branch flow.

The good news - branch support is now available for GitHub and GitLab, and it's very easy to get started.

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Automatically detecting problems in your Salesforce Change Sets and deployment packages

Stephen Chambers on April 4th 2016

Have you ever experienced a failed deployment to one of your Salesforce orgs?

Perhaps you've even experienced a deployment failure despite extensive preparation. All tests have passed and the validated deployment package is just waiting to go, and it's only after the process kicks off that it implodes and the deployment has to be rolled back while you pick apart the reasons.

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Source controlling Salesforce Metadata with GitLab

Kevin Boyle on March 28th 2016

Source controlling any software project has many advantages, particularly around audit and traceability, and Salesforce is no different. Using a version control system such as git for your Apex, VisualForce, or metadata helps developers and admins collaborate and understand what everyone is working on.

Gearset has supported source control via GitHub since September 2015 and based on user feedback, we’ve now released support for GitLab.

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Implementing Salesforce testing best practice with Gearset

Jason Mann on March 17th 2016

One of the challenges of managing a Salesforce organization is that undocumented changes can be made in Production which have knock-on effects on your existing unit tests (see our last blog post on why testing is important). These lurking test failures often lie hidden until deployment time, leading to unexpected deployment failures.

In this post, we’ll look at how to use the test runner feature of Gearset to automate testing in your orgs and stop undocumented changes silently breaking your existing unit tests.

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Salesforce testing best practice: why you should regularly run production tests

Jason Mann on March 16th 2016

Testing your code to ensure it’s working correctly is a core tenet of good Salesforce development. But when was the last time you ran unit tests in your production org, and why do you need to?

In this post we’ll explore why testing in Salesforce is important, why you should be testing regularly, and how test automation can help.

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Easier filtering of Salesforce metadata

Harry Frankish on March 15th 2016

Having recently joined GearsetHQ, I’ve been handed small tasks to help me get familiar with the product. It’s not just to settle me in though - we have an ongoing commitment to responding to feedback and releasing even minor tweaks to improve the experience of our users. The latest example makes it easier to select metadata filters to apply to organization comparisons.

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Using Salesforce quick deploy and validated deployment packages with Gearset

Jason Mann on March 14th 2016

Validation-only deployments catch errors early, support an Agile release approach, and can significantly shorten the final Production deployment. With our latest update, Gearset now fully supports validation-only deployments.

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Gearset support for TLS 1.1 and TLS 1.2 Salesforce orgs

Kevin Boyle on March 11th 2016

Salesforce are moving to requiring TLS 1.1 and TLS 1.2 for connecting to Salesforce orgs, including how partners like Gearset connect. Salesforce have released an optional update that you can enable in your org that will require apps to use TLS 1.1 and TLS 1.2.

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Cloning Inbound Change Sets for mature Salesforce ALM

Kevin Boyle on March 9th 2016

A common strategy in any software project is to have a pipeline of environments.You start with a development environment to make the required changes, which are then promoted to a test environment for QA. Those changes get signed-off by your business users in a UAT environment before finally being deployed to production when all stakeholders are confident in the release.

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How to deploy a Salesforce Sales Path

Kevin Boyle on February 18th 2016

In the words of Salesforce itself, Sales Paths are a feature of Salesforce that “keep sales reps focused on what’s most important to close deals fast. By guiding reps to the right fields and sales content at the right time, Sales Path enforces and ensures adoption of your company’s sales process.”

These sound like a great addition to any Sales Cloud, but how do you deploy them?

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Merging Salesforce metadata: How to merge Custom Objects and other Salesforce metadata

Kevin Boyle on February 15th 2016

One of the issues that commonly crops up when working together on a team is merging metadata or deploying only a small part of the work you’ve done.

This often happens if you have more than one developer working in a single developer sandbox, and is almost unavoidable when you work on a larger team with everybody in their own sandboxes.

So what is the best way to merge complicated Salesforce metadata?

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Using Change Sets or ANT? Simplify your Salesforce releases with Gearset

Jason Mann on February 2nd 2016

Salesforce is an incredibly powerful and fast-growing platform. By pioneering the Software as a Service model, it has enabled thousands of businesses to improve their operational efficiency and grow their sales.

Effective as it is, adopting a company-wide platform is not without its challenges. Managing change and avoiding conflict in a system where end users, as well as development teams, are encouraged to edit the production environment requires a planned approach and effective information management. That's where Gearset can help.

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Improve team collaboration with email, SMS, Slack, and Chatter notifications

Jason Mann on January 22nd 2016

If, like many Salesforce admins and developers, you work as part of a team, you’ll know the importance of effective information sharing. Knowing what features your colleagues are working on and when they deploy to Staging or Production speeds up development and helps avoid code clashes.

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Automatic Chatter notifications when your Salesforce orgs change

Jason Mann on January 18th 2016

Chatter, Salesforce’s enterprise social network, is a great way to stay up to date with the latest events in your Salesforce community. Colleagues can post updates, links to files, and notify people of important events. With Gearset, you can also stay up to date with metadata changes via instant Chatter notifications.

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Webinar: register for our free talk on best-practice Salesforce release management

Jason Mann on January 13th 2016

Salesforce is an incredibly powerful and fast-growing platform. By pioneering the Software as a Service (SaaS) model, it has enabled thousands of businesses to improve their operational efficiency and grow their sales.

Adopting a company-wide platform is not without its challenges. Managing change and avoiding conflict in a system where end users, as well as development teams, are encouraged to edit the production environment requires a planned approach and effective information management.

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Roadmap review: Q4 delivered! Insight, deployment annotations and group notifications

Jason Mann on December 16th 2015

I’ll admit that when we first put our roadmap together back in early October, I was nervous. We committed to several major new features, the biggest of which being our org change monitoring service, Insight. This alone could easily have been enough to keep us busy until the end of the year. Feeling confident in our abilities, we scheduled a slew of user experience improvements and a major upgrade to the comparison engine that powers Gearset into the mix. Combined with the stress testing of a rapidly increasing user-base, it felt like an ambitious target.

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Learn what you want, when you want, with our new support videos

Jason Mann on December 15th 2015

Learning something new can be challenging. Whether you're picking up a sport or practising a new language, it’s always nice to have a helping hand to guide you. For many people, watching someone else perform a task first helps them learn faster and removes the fear of the unknown.

We've been releasing some great new features for the app over the past few months, including org change monitoring and validated deployment packages. To ensure that everyone makes the most of these new features, we decided to create our new support videos, available on our revamped YouTube channel. They're also categorized on our support page to make it easy to find the right video for you.

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Give your Salesforce audit trail some context with deployment notes

Oli Lane on December 14th 2015

With its deployment history, Gearset Deploy already gives you a trail of what has been deployed into your Salesforce orgs and when. With the introduction of Insight, it can even do that for changes not made through Gearset. However, to get full use out of this trail of deployments you need to know the why, too.

Today we're introducing a new deployment notes feature which gives you the ability to record that context: when you make a deployment, you can now attach notes to it to document why a change was made. That context could help tremendously 6 months down the line when you're trying to work out what happened!

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Deploying changes between Salesforce Editions and the `Could not resolve standard field's name` error

Kevin Boyle on December 10th 2015

Salesforce make it easy to get started with the Force.com platform by providing developer.salesforce.com. Through this, you can provision a brand new Salesforce org in minutes, on which you can develop, experiment and test to your heart’s content, totally free. Best of all, these free dev orgs have all the bells and whistles turned on, with more or less every feature enabled by default. This allows you to try out features of higher editions that you might not have a license for in your own orgs.

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Understand your Salesforce changes at a glance with Gearset

Oli Lane on December 8th 2015

Let's be honest: XML object representations are an eyesore. They're verbose, they're hard to read, and they don't always map intuitively to the interface you see inside Salesforce.

With Gearset Deploy, our goal is to build a deployment tool that really understands your Salesforce data. That's why this week we rolled out changes to our diff viewer which will make it possible to cut through the noise and see what you've actually changed, without trying to parse XML in your head.

We're starting off with picklists, but we've also put work into our engine to make it easier to add other object types in the future.

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Introducing Insight for Gearset - automatic change monitoring for your Salesforce orgs

Jason Mann on December 3rd 2015

One of the last big roadmap releases for 2015 is our much-anticipated org monitoring service. It’s called Insight for Gearset, and we’re excited to announce it has now launched into our preview program.

Here are just a few things you can do with Insight

- Be notified when your Production org changes
- Track all deployments, across all tools, with a complete audit trail
- Download change reports for an org, providing a detailed change log
- Catch undocumented or unscheduled changes directly in Production
- Avoid overwriting others' changes by always being aware of updates
- See who changed what, when, and why in your orgs

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Solving Salesforce dependencies: Queues & Picklists now supported in Gearset

Jason Mann on November 30th 2015

Dependencies are one of the most common causes of failed Salesforce deployments. The various types of Salesforce metadata object can reference each other in a large number of different ways. It’s not always obvious from a casual inspection which objects need to be deployed alongside each other in order to cause a deployment to succeed.

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In field: summarizedField - no CustomField named {fieldName} found

Luke Drury on November 25th 2015

Roll-up summary fields

Salesforce allows you to create roll-up summary fields on master objects, in a master-detail relationship. These roll-up fields perform calculations on the fields that they roll up, such as summing the numbers in that field. This is useful for things such as calculating the sum of certain kinds of invoices.

Why deployments can fail due to roll-up summary fields

Roll-up summary fields have dependencies on a couple of other fields. They depend on the field they're rolling up in the target object, and also the master-detail relationship field in the target object - Salesforce calls these the Read the rest of this post

Comparing Salesforce reports: Salesforce deployment subtlety #1138

Kevin Boyle on November 24th 2015

Ok, so the title of this blog post may be more inspired by the impending release of The Force Awakens than the actual number of deployment subtleties that are now baked into Gearset, but it certainly feels at this stage that the Gearset comparison and analysis engine knows almost as much about the intricacies of Salesforce deployment as Salesforce itself does.

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No roadworks on this roadmap

Jason Mann on November 24th 2015

When we launched our roadmap in early October, we promised it would be a living document, updated as we deliver new features. Over the past few weeks, we’ve been striking a brisk pace with new feature development - so fast, in fact, that the blog is yet to fully catch up! The result of this is we’re on schedule to deliver all the promised features for this quarter, well ahead of the Christmas shutdown.

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Processing the world's Salesforce metadata isn't easy!

Kevin Boyle on November 13th 2015

Gearset works differently to any other deployment or release management solution for Salesforce. Other tools, like the Force.com Migration Tool (ANT), use the Salesforce Metadata API to get the metadata as text files, but have no understanding of the actual metadata within those files.

Gearset processes the files downloaded from the Metadata API to have a semantic understanding of the metadata, including the relationships between objects. This allows us to do things like detect missing dependencies, detect API version mismatches on APEX, deal with differences in history tracking (blog), and deal with quirks in Salesforce deployments that require understanding of your org metadata to work around (blog).

Any deployment service that doesn’t have a rich understanding of the metadata will always encounter these bugs and at best will only ever be thin automation around the Salesforce Metadata APIs.

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Validate your deployments ahead of time with Gearset

Jason Mann on November 12th 2015

When you’ve got a crucial deployment to make or a narrow release window, the last thing you want to spend valuable time on is picking apart why a deployment failed or rebuilding the package on the fly. One way around this is to check ahead of time that your deployment package will successfully deploy. The deployment can then be swiftly promoted on demand, safe in the knowledge that the tests have passed and you haven’t missed any crucial dependencies. We call these validated packages, and they're a great way to reduce deployment failures and make release day that little bit less stressful.

Today we launched the first stage of support for validated packages: Gearset now allows you to create and validate your deployment package without actually running a deployment. You can then come back later to kick off the deployment, knowing that everything has already been tested.

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Easily manage your Salesforce deployment process with named orgs

Oli Lane on November 11th 2015

We're rolling out another usability enhancement this week, as outlined on the roadmap for this quarter: you can now add your own friendly names to your saved Salesforce orgs.

If you're constantly fumbling over similar Salesforce usernames (we certainly are), we think this is a great feature to improve your experience with Gearset Deploy.

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The entity: {object} does not have history tracking enabled

Luke Drury on November 9th 2015

Tracking changes to CustomObjects

In Salesforce it's possible to enable history tracking on custom and standard objects. Once you've done this, you can then turn on history tracking on a per field basis, and so track changes to fields you're interested in.

Why deployments can fail due to changes in history tracking

In Gearset we break objects down into sub-components during the comparison, giving you control over which changes to an object you want to deploy. An example of this is standard objects and their fields. For example, you can deploy a new picklist value on a field without also deploying changes to the parent object to which it belongs, or changes to other fields in that object.

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Cannot set field to ControlledByParent on a CustomObject without a MasterDetail relationship field

Jason Mann on October 27th 2015

Solving the Salesforce bug: Master-Detail fields must always be included in deployments

Some objects in Salesforce organizations are linked through relationships. These relationships are managed through custom fields and determine how the objects handle data deletion, record ownership, security and required fields in page layouts (see Salesforce developers guide). One relationship type is Master-Detail. This is a one:many relationship type in which the master (or parent) object controls certain aspects of the behaviour of the detail (child) objects.

There is a known Salesforce bug with master-detail relationships which is a common deployment failure point for many users. It affects change sets and the Force.com migration tool, and any other tool which uses the metadata API.

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Salesforce deployment - From Production Hacker to Agile Guru (Video)

Jason Mann on October 22nd 2015

Between our booth in the dev zone, our appearance on the live podcast and Kevin’s talks on release management, we made a big splash at Dreamforce this year.

If you didn’t get the opportunity to see either of Kevin’s great talks during the conference, now’s your chance. Dive into the world of release management and best practices in Salesforce and start improving your deployments today.

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Sick of checkboxes? Saved comparison options are here!

Oli Lane on October 16th 2015

As the first of a series of usability enhancements that we outlined on our roadmap this week, we're rolling out a small but significant change which we hope will really improve your day-to-day interaction with Gearset Deploy.

You can now save your own custom comparison sets and retrieve them next time you want to compare the same metadata types. No more manually selecting checkboxes every time: just select your custom set from the drop-down menu.

Here's how it works.

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Introducing the Gearset roadmap - built on your feedback

Jason Mann on October 14th 2015

Over the past few months we’ve spoken with hundreds of Salesforce users around the world. From dedicated developers to awesome admins, we took the time to understand their deployment pains and find out what their perfect release management solution would look like. We covered the whole spectrum of Salesforce users: large corporations with complex release management, consultants working with multiple clients, and small non-profits working directly in a product environment.

The aim of all of this: to help us understand how our users approach deployments, what they find particularly difficult, and what they aspire to achieve. We collected a huge amount of incredibly valuable feedback, and to all who took the time to speak with us – thank you!

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Dreamforce - 1 booth, 4 days, 600 demos. What a week!

Jason Mann on September 25th 2015

It's over. We made it! Dreamforce was bigger than ever this year, with well over 170,000 attendees descending upon central San Francisco. It was a tough week, but I think it's fair to say it went better than we could ever have expected.

Our booth, in the heart of the DevZone, was packed from open to close every day - not surprising given we gave over 600 demos during the week! The whole team was blown away by the positive response and the level of engagement from the community. To each and everyone who came along to our booth for a chat, a demo or just to collect one of our swanky t-shirts: thank you!

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Gearset is free for Salesforce MVPs

Kevin Boyle on September 17th 2015

Here at Gearset we’re quite proud of what we’ve built. We’ve been blown away by the overwhelmingly positive feedback we’ve received over the past few days at Dreamforce. It’s been hard work for sure, with plenty of sweat and tears poured into making Gearset a reality, but seeing the value real users are gaining makes all the effort worthwhile.

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Feature preview: Supporting continuous integration (CI) with Gearset Deploy

Stephen Chambers on September 15th 2015

One of the key goals for creating Gearset Deploy has been to make deployments to your Salesforce orgs as simple and painless as possible. If you develop for the Salesforce platform and need to perform deployments, you’ll be well aware that it can involve a number of repeated manual steps. One way to automate this process is through the implementation of a continuous integration development process.

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GitHub integration has arrived!

Spencer Thang on September 10th 2015

Supporting continuous integration (CI) has always been part of our vision for Gearset Deploy. Continuous integration allows you to merge developer working copies to a shared main repository at scheduled intervals, reducing integration bugs and keeping the main repository current.

In preparation for continuous integration, we've added support for comparing GitHub repositories with Salesforce organizations. With this new feature, you can easily view changes between developer working copies and deploy metadata directly to your Salesforce organizations.

In the near future, you'll be able to schedule these comparisons and deployments at regular intervals, making integration a pain-free process. Here's how to get started.

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Destructive changes are easy with Gearset Deploy

Jason Mann on September 3rd 2015

In the productive world of Salesforce, deleting objects and fields can be a pain. Unsupported by change sets and difficult to master with the Force.com migration tool, the simple deletion of a few objects can bring seasoned admins to their knees. That doesn’t sound like the kind of Salesforce experience everyone hopes for.

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Want to become an Apex expert?

Kevin Boyle on September 2nd 2015

In the Salesforce world of No Software, it’s no secret that we sometimes need to write code. Much less code than we need to on other platforms, but we still need to get our hands dirty from time to time.

I came to Salesforce from a Java and C# background, so when I transitioned to Salesforce I naturally approached it from the code angle ¹. I read as much as I could find to get up to speed on best-practice, and the single best resource I found was Advanced Apex by Dan Appleman. If you’re coming from another programming language and want to understand how to get the most from Apex and the Force.com platform, then this is the book for you.

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Gearset whitepaper - best-practice in Salesforce release management

Jason Mann on August 28th 2015

Gearset was founded on the idea of simplifying Salesforce deployments. Over the past year we’ve worked closely with the Salesforce community to create a service that delivers on that idea and provides real value to Salesforce users.

Creating the service is only half the solution. It takes care of the how, but enabling simple Salesforce deployments also requires an understanding of the why: the thought process that controls when and where changes are moved between environments. It’s no good being able to deploy in a few clicks if your changes cause disruption to other users in your business.

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Gearset will be at Dreamforce 2015!

Jason Mann on August 4th 2015

We’re thrilled to announce that Gearset have a stand in the Developer Zone at Dreamforce in San Francisco this September. Even more exciting, Kevin, one of our co-founders, is giving a talk on best practice deployment in Salesforce! If you’re attending, be sure to drop by our stand for a demo or come along to Kevin’s talk to learn something new about simplifying deployments.

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Designing Gearset Deploy: scheduling automatic backups of your Salesforce organization metadata

Stephen Chambers on July 28th 2015

Metadata defines almost every area of a Force.com application, and it can specify key configurations of components and even aspects of how your Salesforce organizations behave. Salesforce organization metadata isn’t automatically backed up by the platform, and that’s a potentially dangerous situation when it comes to tracking changes over time, especially considering how critically important the metadata can be.

For some companies, development can happen directly in Salesforce without any strict QA or source control process in place. The chance of a problem occurring increases with the complexity of a Salesforce organization and the number of developers or administrators involved, all of whom might be making changes over the course of a project.

With an automated daily backup process to save any Salesforce organization metadata changes, you can trace back and recover to a previous point in time. With the upcoming automated metadata backup feature in Gearset Deploy, you’ll be able to do this in just a couple of clicks.

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Walkthrough: using Gearset to deploy changes from a production to a sandbox Salesforce organisation

Jason Mann on July 13th 2015

Prompted by a question on the Salesforce Stack Exchange, I wanted to demonstrate how easy it is to use Gearset Deploy to manage migrating a Salesforce app from your production org to a sandbox.

Gearset Deploy is designed to allow you to quickly synchronize your Salesforce orgs, search for and select the changes you want to make. It’s all done through the UI, and it includes highlighted line-by-line differences and dependency analysis to increase your deployment success rate.

This post is a short walkthrough of how you would go about moving some changes or an app from production to sandbox.

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Designing Gearset Deploy: accessing your Salesforce deployment history

Jason Mann on July 10th 2015

To ensure the ongoing design and feature development of Gearset Deploy continues to meet our customers’ needs, we’re always listening to your feedback. One topic that has cropped up consistently is to provide a way to access a history of previous Salesforce deployments within the business. We’ve heard of situations where changes are being manually saved in a document, or even written down, in an attempt to keep track of what’s been updated. In this post we'll look at why it's important to keep a deployment history and how you can manage your deployment history in Gearset Deploy.

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Weekly Update: No more downloads, Gearset Cloud is here!

Kevin Boyle on July 8th 2015

Feedback from our users has been really positive, and Gearset Deploy is helping people move changes between their Salesforce orgs with ease, but our number one request has been to provide a cloud version so that people don't need to install anything or keep it up-to-date.

In this week's update, I walk through the cloud version of Gearset Deploy and show how easy it is to get started.

If you want to try out the new cloud version, just visit gearset.com to get started.

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Weekly Update: Minimizing Salesforce deployment failures using Gearset’s new dependency analysis

Kevin Boyle on June 26th 2015

Salesforce developers and admins often suffer come deployment time trying to work out the correct order in which to deploy things so that the deployment succeeds. Lots of time is spent tearing apart Profiles and PermissionSets to find the smallest slice that can be deployed to meet that end-of-sprint deadline. We end up doing tedious work, instead of the valuable work we should be doing for our businesses.

This video shows the latest addition to Gearset in our quest to make all your deployments simpler. We're adding dependency analysis to metadata objects so you can automatically deploy the slices of Profiles and related objects when you make a change in your Salesforce org.

If you want to try out this dependency feature on your deployments then get in touch at [email protected].

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A sneak peek at the cloud edition of Gearset Deploy

Stephen Chambers on June 15th 2015

We’ve been receiving lots of emails asking about the potential availability of a hosted version of Gearset Deploy – whether it’s on our roadmap, when might it be available, and what additional features might be included. We thought we’d answer all those questions in one go, and also share some of the designs we’re working on!

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Secure authorization for your Salesforce orgs: implementing OAuth in Gearset Deploy

Matt Dickens on June 11th 2015

We’ve recently been hearing from our more security-conscious users that they’d like to use OAuth to grant permissions to their organizations – in fact, it’s right near the top of our most requested features in UserVoice.

We know that for our users, their Salesforce organizations are at the heart of their businesses and the safety of these organizations is of the utmost importance. With that in mind, the latest release of Gearset Deploy offers OAuth as the default mechanism of connecting to organizations.

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Designing Gearset Deploy: enhanced filtering of Salesforce metadata

Stephen Chambers on June 4th 2015

We’re constantly evolving Gearset Deploy and spending a great deal of time making sure that performing your Salesforce deployments is a simple process. We’d like to share our current ideas for future features and get your thoughts on the designs that are on our roadmap. This blog post details the feedback we’ve had about the current Gearset Deploy filtering feature, and how it could be even better in future versions.

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Large Salesforce orgs and the 10,000-item API limit

Chris Hurley on May 19th 2015

Gearset Deploy is designed to retrieve metadata from Salesforce organizations in order to compare them and identify the operations required to deploy changes between them. This information is obtained through the Salesforce Metadata API, which can be queried for specific object types or names and provides a .zip file containing the requested metadata.

However, when registering large organizations, it’s easy to run into its limits. Calls retrieving metadata can only request up to 10,000 files or 400MB at a time, and attempting to retrieve more than this results in failure. Tools designed primarily for Apex development, such as the Force.com IDE and MavensMate, are less likely to hit these limits because they’re geared towards working only with a subset of the objects in your organization. When comparing and deploying entire organizations, though, it becomes increasingly likely that the limits will be exceeded. If you’ve used the Force.com Migration Tool, which is a wrapper around the Metadata API, you may have come across these limitations yourself.

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What can we do with custom metadata types in Salesforce Summer '15?

Kevin Boyle on April 29th 2015

The sun has started to show itself here in Cambridge – people are punting with Pimm’s on the River Cam, strawberries are back in the stores, and that means the Salesforce Summer '15 release is upon us!

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What is Salesforce1 Lightning Process Builder?

Kevin Boyle on April 24th 2015

We all know that Salesforce is an innovative company, and they're always improving the Salesforce1 platform. But it seems they've recently picked up the pace with everything that's coming under the Salesforce1 Lightning banner. One of the simplest additions, but one that could have a big impact on your daily workflow, is Salesforce1 Lightning Process Builder.

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Customizing Salesforce comparisons: user-driven design in Gearset Deploy

Stephen Chambers on April 21st 2015

When it comes to the design, implementation, and release process, life’s been a whole lot easier working on Gearset Deploy than perhaps any previous project. There’s been no single defining moment, but if you asked me to pick the most significant of the contributing factors, I’d have to go for the involvement of users earlier in the design process.

This has been facilitated – or, as it turns out, supercharged – by using Slack, a team communication platform, to create external channels where users can hang out, talk, and discuss features or challenges. We’ve also added users to our GitHub repository so that everyone can create, view, and comment on specific issues and see progress.

So, how has early user involvement helped with our latest release?

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Who made that change to my Salesforce metadata, and when?

Kevin Boyle on April 9th 2015

Salesforce organizations can quickly become complex: after all, they drive your entire business process and help your users succeed, so a certain degree of complexity is inevitable. This means it's especially important that deploying changes between organizations is as simple as possible.

Gearset Deploy makes it easy to see what has changed, but some of our users told us they'd also like to see who made each change and when, so that they'd have all the context to understand what should be deployed.

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Migrating Salesforce changes with Gearset Deploy

Kevin Boyle on April 2nd 2015

In this short video, you'll see how you can use Gearset Deploy to move changes from one Salesforce organization to another.

This could be sharing changes between developers, moving changes from development to UAT, or promoting changes from your sandbox through to your production organization.

If you've tried Gearset Deploy and have feedback, get in touch at [email protected].

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Salesforce deployment best practices

Andrew Hunter on March 19th 2015

In any software development project, the riskiest point is always deployment time. It's often the first time that new features come into contact with the real production environment, and this means it's a time when a lot of the possible failure modes are concentrated.

With infrastructure deployments - such as the typical Salesforce deployment scenario - the stakes are higher still, as the users are dependent on the development team to fix all of the most critical problems that crop up before they start to interfere with their jobs.

Here are some things that can be done to manage deployments and mitigate the risks.

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Gearset takes the pain out of Salesforce deployments

Neil Anderson on March 8th 2015

Salesforce is famed for its easy development model. “Point and click” has made developers of us all, but when it’s time to deliver changes to end users, we hit a stumbling block. Our world of speedy feature development disintegrates into change sets, environments, test coverage requirements, and change tracking. Suddenly, the reality of how our updates might affect the organization – the organization that real people are logging into every day to keep our business running – dawns on us. Everything slows down. The fun stops. The pressure is on.

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