Jump into your sandbox

by Alicia Schmidt, Customer Success Evangelist

If you haven’t already, we highly recommend taking your shoes off and jumping into your Salesforce sandbox. What is a sandbox in Salesforce? It is a copy of what Salesforce calls your “production environment” – the Salesforce “org” where you do your work and where your live data is stored. Sandboxes are completely isolated from your production org, so anything that you do in your sandbox will not affect your “live” configuration and vice-versa. That makes sandboxes the perfect place to test applications from the AppExchange, develop customizations of your own, and do staff training.

If you make a mess of things, no problem, your “real” data and org is protected and your sandbox can be refreshed 29 days from its creation or from the last refresh.

There are three types of sandboxes available to Salesforce.com customers. They include configuration-only, developer, and full sandboxes. Read more about the three types of sandboxes here >

Nonprofit customers of Salesforce.org receive 1 configuration only sandbox and 5 developer sandboxes as part of the Power of Us donation program. Configuration-only sandboxes copy all your objects, reports, dashboards, applications, and customizations but exclude all of your records, documents and attachments (basically, your data).

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIgVhP9Guh8]

You can also purchase additional sandboxes of any type at a deep discount from the Foundation. For information about purchasing additional
sandboxes, please call 1.800.NOSOFTWARE.

In the Winter ’10 release last year, Salesforce made it easy to deploy sets of changes between your sandbox and production environments. So, with a few
clicks, you can take any changes, updates or applications that you have set up in your sandbox and move it easily into your production environment. Check out this demo on YouTube. You can also search “change sets” in the Help and Training section in your organization.