Blog - Salesforce features

• 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.

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• 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.

  Get the survey report

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• 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.

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• 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:

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• 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:

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• 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.

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• 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!

  Start the survey!

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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