Utilized by more than 150,000 businesses from all over the world, Salesforce is unarguably a leading cloud-based CRM software. Suitable for any scale and size of business, it acts as a portable tool for managing applications, customer relations & service, sales, marketing, analytics, and more.
While the suite of cloud-based tools can efficiently manage your day-to-day business activities, you need assistance in managing and customizing the software as per your needs. And availing of Salesforce development services can ensure that.
But your job isn’t finished as soon as you hire Salesforce service providers as you need to walk them through your business practices and devise a plan together for smooth business process and productivity.
That’s precisely why you need to be well-informed about the development and deployment practices of Salesforce developers in 2024. And if you are a Salesforce developer or implementation partner, these tips can come in handy for you too.
Table of Contents
Best Salesforce Development & Deployment Tips
1) Start building with scalability in mind
Most companies start deploying software like Salesforce based on their current business size and end up with ingrained customer habits. And eventually, struggle to optimize their business processes for a larger section of the audience.
Consequently, you have to keep scalability in mind from the moment you begin developing and deploying your CRM software. In case you are a small-scale organization, adopt a deployment process as a medium-sized company would.
How to do so?
- The first step is documentation. You have to document everything so that any member that joins your company can understand how your software is built, managed, and works.
- You can publish a data dictionary for your organization where you keep records of data types, Schema, naming conventions, etc.
2) Build a complete sandbox strategy
Salesforce Sandbox is a copy of your Salesforce production environment where you can perform various operations such as development, customization, user acceptance testing, quality assurance, etc.
To build a Sandbox strategy, you need to specify data requirements for each SDLC stage, people responsible for the environment, and the ones who can access it. Salesforce service providers offer various kinds of Sandbox modes for you to choose from –
- Full – This Sandbox copy is a complete replica of your production environment with all the integrations. Thus, authenticated users can perform UAT (user acceptance testing). Businesses should limit access in this case.
- Developer – With a storage capacity of about 200 megabytes, this mode is suitable for developers to perform various operations like QA and testing.
- Developer Pro – It is similar to the developer mode with a storage capacity of up to 1 GB.
- Partial data – Here, the copy relies on sample data and metadata and is suitable for staging, performance testing, and training team for change management.
While a business can opt for any of the above sandbox modes, settling for a partial sandbox could be a limitation for them. It makes it difficult to deploy configuration data or run tests in data-heavy environments.
If you opt for a full Sandbox model, you automatically get access to the other Sandbox types. However, the price would be a bit on the higher end. So, businesses must see what works best for them.
3) Create SDLC
One of the best practices of Salesforce development companies is to create an SDLC (software development lifecycle). Conflicts are bound to happen when multiple users and teams work on a project as there can be miscommunication or any silly/minor mistakes in documenting any change.
To evade such situations, creating an SDLC is necessary. You can establish clear parameters, outline integration, and deployment changes, & more.
4) Set up version tracking
Whether you are a small-scale business or a large enterprise, setting up version tracking is crucial for any business type. It gets easier to track and manage any changes in code and revert if things go south.
Businesses can also utilize this to assess the bottlenecks of their system and track waste and manage for efficiency.
5) Establish suitable permission levels
Salesforce software is meant to ease your business operations and not complicate them. So, it offers businesses the ability to manage access to data, permission sets, roles, and hierarchies.
However, with such privileges comes greater responsibilities. Businesses have to look so that no sensitive information is handed over to unauthorized users or no organization data is compromised.
To do so, one should always practice the ‘principle of least privilege’. According to this, a person should be given the bare minimum access that he/she needs to perform their job. And when needed, you can always provide them with more access.
Final Words
The development and deployment practices mentioned above should help you create a seamless experience for your organization in 2024. However, that’s not all you need to pay attention to.
There are a plethora of things you have to look after and renowned Salesforce development companies can help you in this pursuit. The developers and deployment professionals will help customize Salesforce as per your tailored business needs and deploy it successfully.