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Salesforce DevOps at Dreamforce 2021

David Runciman on September 28th 2021

Dreamforce is always a whirlwind of exciting announcements, inspiring stories and fascinating presentations, and this year was no exception. Now that the dust has settled, you might be wondering about the key takeaways for you and your team, so here are some of the announcements that have the potential to be game-changing for admins, developers and IT leaders. With new and improved tools for both low-code and pro-code developers on their way, plus DevOps Center and the imminent arrival of Backup and Restore, there's plenty to explore!

5 ways to improve collaboration across Salesforce teams

Simon Breslaw on July 2nd 2021

Collaboration in Salesforce teams can be difficult. But making the transition from in-org development to a source-driven DevOps process empowers everyone with a quick and reliable way to move new work down the release pipeline. A complete Salesforce DevOps solution like Gearset builds on the fundamentals of the modern DevOps process to make team collaboration even easier and more efficient. This post highlights five additional ways administrators and developers can stay aligned and up to date with their team's latest changes and development work.

How to keep your Salesforce environments in sync

David Runciman on June 18th 2021

Struggling with Salesforce orgs that are out of sync? You're not alone. Respondents to our State of Salesforce DevOps 2021 survey reported that keeping their orgs in sync was a significant challenge. The good news is that several other respondents said their DevOps workflows had helped solve this problem. In this post we'll take a good look at how to keep your orgs in sync: why it matters, the challenges, and the best solutions.

What's the real ROI of Salesforce DevOps?

Simon Breslaw on June 14th 2021

Measuring a return on investment in Salesforce DevOps is a difficult undertaking, but a task that's well worth the effort. An ROI evaluation is sometimes required by teams who need to convince their senior management of the financial benefits of implementing a new process, especially when purchasing new DevOps tools. There are also good business arguments for continually measuring your performance and assessing the value added by your Salesforce team.

The healthcare sector needs DevOps to cure sluggish Salesforce releases

David Runciman on June 4th 2021

Organizations in the healthcare and pharma sector lag slightly behind average performances for Salesforce development and release management, across a number of key metrics. Gearset's State of Salesforce DevOps survey revealed that a lower prioritization of Salesforce DevOps in the sector correlates with slower releases and higher change failure rates. Teams of Salesforce professionals in healthcare need to adopt DevOps if they are to keep pace with rising demand for new customizations, continue to enhance resilience, and ensure compliance with stringent regulations.

Why financial firms bank on Salesforce DevOps

Simon Breslaw on May 14th 2021

Financial firms are often at the forefront of integrating business operations via innovative solutions built on top of the Salesforce platform. At the same time, these companies are required to operate in highly regulated environments with no margin for error.

We've analyzed the data from our State of Salesforce DevOps 2021 survey to gather more insights into how the financial sector is able to deliver Salesforce-driven innovation at speed. This post assesses the development and release processes of financial firms to see how they stack up against performances by companies in other industries.

Top 10 business benefits of Salesforce DevOps

Simon Breslaw on May 7th 2021

Salesforce DevOps helps IT departments deliver more business value by increasing the speed, frequency and quality of their releases. But there are many reasons why companies that rely on the Salesforce platform seek out powerful DevOps tools and adopt agile DevOps practices.

The benefits of Salesforce DevOps are often enterprise-wide, spanning many technical and operational areas. This article draws on key findings of The State of Salesforce DevOps 2021 industry report to give you a list of the top ten benefits to businesses.

Salesforce implementation partners use Gearset to deliver more for their customers

Dave Carter on May 5th 2021

Gearset is partnering with a growing number of SIs and Salesforce consultancies across the ecosystem. These Salesforce partners are experts at building business solutions for companies using Salesforce, and they rely on Gearset to handle the challenges of release management on the platform.

A guide to building a Center of Excellence for Salesforce DevOps

Vernon Keenan on April 29th 2021

This guest post is contributed by Vernon Keenan, Senior Industry Analyst at SalesforceDevops.net.

Salesforce DevOps solutions like Gearset deliver proven, measurable success for Salesforce teams around the world. The demand for solutions has picked up worldwide, and the IT industry now sees Salesforce DevOps competency as a concern that requires management and focus. To see evidence of widespread DevOps adoption across the ecosystem for yourself, be sure to check out Gearset's State of Salesforce DevOps 2021 report.

The latest on Salesforce's DevOps Center from the Gearset Summit

Simon Breslaw on April 21st 2021

In the second half of 2020, Salesforce began releasing information about its upcoming new ALM solution: DevOps Center. This change and release management tool is designed to democratize DevOps and improve the declarative developer experience. It offers admins and declarative developers a single UI interface to manage modern Git-based workflows alongside programmatic developers.

When DevOps Center was first announced, we gleaned what information we could find, speaking and writing about it towards the end of last year. At our recent Gearset Summit, Karen Fidelak, Senior Director of Product Management at Salesforce, gave a fantastic session on DevOps Center which included more information. Here are the key updates.

Salesforce DevOps approaches maturity

Simon Breslaw on April 16th 2021

Across the Salesforce ecosystem, teams are adopting DevOps tools and practices. Our recent survey report, The State of Salesforce DevOps 2021, shines a light on what's driving companies to make the transition to modern application lifecycle management (ALM).

This article explores the current DevOps adoption trends highlighted by the report, sets out key challenges faced by Salesforce teams, and discusses a few of the many reasons why DevOps is fast becoming the standard way of managing development pipelines on the platform.

Get the survey report: The State of Salesforce DevOps 2021

David Runciman on April 1st 2021

How widespread is DevOps among Salesforce teams right now? What's driving DevOps adoption? How does my team's performance in release management compare to others in the ecosystem? What's the future of Salesforce DevOps?

Find out the answers to all of these questions, and more, in the full survey report: The State of Salesforce DevOps 2021.

Looking ahead with Gearset's product roadmap

Ben Assirati on March 26th 2021

Over the years, Gearset has grown alongside our users, matching ambition with precision to provide the best possible DevOps solution for Salesforce. We've navigated our way to become the leading DevOps solution by holding firm to two of our core values: listening to our community, and bringing DevOps best practices to Salesforce.

Gearset thrives at the intersection of these values; always listening to our users and always sharing the progress we're making together. This is why we provide a platform for feature requests and suggestions, publish our roadmap, and even share the stats about how Gearset is being used around the world.

Salesforce is bringing back its Data Recovery Service - but does that change anything?

Ben Assirati on March 15th 2021

Salesforce recently announced that it's reversing its decision to take away its Data Recovery Service. The tool was provided as a last resort for companies on Salesforce in the event of data loss, and was retired in the summer of 2020. Salesforce gave several reasons for its initial decision: notably the small number of customers using it, and the existence of third-party tools in the ecosystem providing the same service.

The revival of this tool may be significant news to some companies, but it should make little difference to teams on Salesforce. Here's why:

How to perfect your Salesforce data backup and recovery strategy

Ben Assirati on February 12th 2021

Data is the lynchpin for the success of every business on Salesforce. Without it processes can't function, teams can't operate, and businesses can't succeed. The loss or corruption of data on Salesforce can cause a major disruption, so ensuring the integrity and retrievability of that data is crucial. To guarantee success, data needs to be secure. It must be backed up sufficiently, with a reliable restore process in place to retrieve any data that may be lost. Here's why:

I know Java/C#, so developing in Salesforce's Apex will be easy, right?

Jenny Phillips Campbell on February 2nd 2021

Well, maybe. Apex definitely looks like Java. But if you're coming from something like a Java or C# background, you might find that Apex doesn't always behave in the ways you'd expect. In this post, I'm going to walk you through a few of the pitfalls I came across as an experienced developer picking up Apex.

What's the state of Salesforce DevOps in 2021?

David Runciman on January 21st 2021

The Salesforce ecosystem is embracing DevOps like never before. Over the last six years, more and more teams have been adopting DevOps tools and processes. And now that Salesforce itself promotes DevOps, that trend is set to accelerate. But what's the state of Salesforce DevOps right now? We want to know - and you can help us by taking part in our survey! As an extra incentive (as if you needed one 😉 ), you can enter our prize draw for a MacBook!

DevOps Center - the latest from DreamTX

Simon Breslaw on December 18th 2020

We were excited to see DevOps Center announced as a topic for one of the DreamTX sessions at this year's Dreamforce To You. Salesforce's DevOps Center promises to help teams of all technical abilities collaborate and manage their development pipelines using source control from within an easy-to-use Salesforce UI. We joined the session and were keen to hear the questions and answers about the project.

What are dynamic forms and how do you deploy them with Gearset?

David Runciman on November 17th 2020

When Salesforce publishes its release notes, we're always interested to find out more detail about the latest goodies. In the Winter '21 Release Notes, dynamic forms are one of the things that caught our eye. This new feature offers a very welcome improvement for admins and developers looking for more granular control of Lightning record pages.

How to create and deploy a scheduled flow

Michael Halliwell on November 3rd 2020

Need help creating and deploying a scheduled flow? Here's a step-by-step guide, written by one of Gearset's Community Advisors - the wonderful Michael Halliwell. This article assumes you already have base knowledge around the logic and data elements of flows.

5 things we know about Salesforce DevOps Center

Ben Assirati on September 30th 2020

For the past few months, Salesforce has been teasing developers with the first of their DevOps solutions. The DevOps Center will be a change and release management application focused on providing a straightforward UI and a collaborative environment throughout the DevOps process for both admins and developers. Not much is known about the Center beyond that, but Gearset has scraped together all the information we could.

Gearset - free to use with Work.com orgs!

Kevin Boyle on June 25th 2020

2020 has been a challenging year for everyone. As a company, Gearset has tried to help where we can, and we've often wondered what more we could be doing. Making Gearset free to use with Work.com orgs until the end of this year is another way that we're happy to be able to help.

Salesforce developed Work.com to provide companies with the tools and information they need to bring their workforce back to the workplace safely, despite Covid-19. Gearset will help companies to implement Work.com faster, so they're back up and running in the office as quickly as possible.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.