Color Consultancy uses Gearset to deliver more for their clients
Color Consultancy was founded in 2013 and, as a leading cloud implementation partner, delivers Salesforce solutions to clients across a range of industries. A huge part of the team’s mission is to help companies implement Salesforce and customize the platform to suit specific business needs quickly, and without code.
Rather than relying on limited first-party tooling like change sets, Color Consultancy wanted an efficient way to manage their clients’ large orgs and complicated deployments. It was clear the team needed to look for a powerful DevOps tool to manage their customers’ development process.
We caught up with Simon Edwards, Salesforce Consultant, and Will Roberts, Delivery Manager, at Color Consultancy to find out how Gearset has improved their release management process.
An alternative to change sets
As Salesforce consultants, the Color Consultancy team regularly deploy between client orgs. Working with a range of customers means Simon and Will are used to inheriting legacy orgs in need of maintenance.
Before adopting Gearset, the team relied on change sets to push changes between their clients’ orgs. Like many Salesforce users, they found using change sets to manually deploy components frustrating, error-prone, and time consuming. With many years’ experience with Salesforce, Simon and Will know all too well the pain of change sets. Without a clear picture of their changes, any issues during deployments would massively slow down the release process. “In change sets you have to choose each component one by one, which is incredibly tedious. When a change set goes wrong, you don’t always really understand why. So it’s easy to lose four or five hours of development time unpicking it,” Simon remembers.
Realising they needed a more reliable release management tool to wrangle their clients’ deployments, Simon and Will began to search for an alternative.
“I did struggle with a few IDE tools, but decided they weren’t for me. We’re huge believers of configuration over code. As our team grew, it made sense for us to look for the right tool. That’s when we found Gearset.”
Gearset gives the team greater insight into their orgs
Since using Gearset, the team’s deployments are easier and faster, and the org comparisons have given Simon and Will much greater insight into the structure of their Salesforce environments. “It’s really useful being able to compare orgs. We can see which components are where, and whether the latest features have been deployed from sandbox to prod,” comments Will.
Gearset keeps a complete deployment history and log of every comparison run, so it’s easy for the Color Consultancy team to understand activity in their clients’ orgs: when a change was made, and why. This transparency isn’t possible if you’re still using change sets, and it’s helping them keep a tight audit trail of every release.
“The reporting functionality within Gearset has been really useful for us. We can quickly review PDF reports with a complete breakdown of everything in that deployment. We can even pinpoint right down to the smallest field change. I think I’d pull my hair out if we still used change sets!”
Gearset’s change monitoring provides a detailed audit trail of configuration changes in their clients’ orgs. Daily snapshots of orgs make it easy for the team to see changes. “We’ve set the filters up in Gearset, so if we see any big changes we can look into it. We can spot disasters coming and spot potential issues cropping up ahead of time which is really great,” says Simon.
The ability to validate deployment packages within Gearset is another standout feature for the Color Consultancy team. “Gearset’s validation before you deploy is really valuable to us,” Will explains. Gearset’s problem analyzers reduce the risk of deployment failure, identifying problems and suggesting solutions before completing a deployment. This safety net takes the risk out of deployments, helping increase the team’s release cadence and enabling them to deliver without the stress of change sets.
Would Color Consultancy recommend Gearset?
As early adopters of Gearset, with over 2,137 successful deployments, Simon and Will understand how different life is with Gearset. Moving away from the limitations of change sets, Color Consultancy’s release process has been streamlined by Gearset, freeing up the team’s time to work on exciting new features for their clients. So, would they recommend us? “The answer is definitely yes,” says Simon, “these guys at Gearset just completely understand the problems Salesforce users face, and how to solve them.”
