Salesforce Sandboxes are an excellent way to copy data from the production.org of your organization for quality assurance, testing, training, etc. They are simple for you to create and work with without interfering with the main production.org. You can create various sandbox environments for your company, depending on what you need for copy configuration, frequency of the refresh, and the storage. With the help of these sandboxes, you can experiment with different new ideas without the need of ruining the current database you are using for your business.

Ideal testing spaces for your organization

These Salesforce Sandboxes are spaces that you can use for testing workflow processes, layouts for pages, objects, and more without even making a change to the present configuration of the organization. However, note that all the Salesforce Sandboxes are not similar, so if you want to use them to the best of your ability, it is very important for you to know what their key differences are. In this way, you can create the sandbox that is appropriate to your needs and use them for the task at hand with success.

Know your sandbox well before you work on them

You have heard about sandboxes regularly; however, in case you do not have a clear idea of them, this post will help you to understand them better. The sandbox you use is just a copy of the organization's database. You can use this database copy for testing out new ideas before you incorporate them into the company.

In many instances, especially when you are working with a skilled consultant on new database functionalities, they create and demonstrate new ideas in a sandbox to show it to you before these ideas become a part of the live database. If you examine Salesforce Sandboxes, you will find there are four types, and all of them are not the same.

Salesforce's The Power of Us Enterprise Edition gives you six free Developer Sandboxes and a Developer Pro Salesforce Sandbox that can hold more data than the Developer Sandboxes. More or less, both of them are the same, and if you want to start working with Salesforce Sandboxes, you can begin with the Developer Sandbox as that is what you generally need.

You can also use the Partial and the Full Salesforce Sandboxes that give you all or some of the production data as well as the database configuration. The Salesforce partial data sandbox pricing information will be given to you by your Salesforce consultant. The same holds true for the Full Sandbox as well. Both of them are premium accounts, and they do not come for free.

Given below is a brief comparison of all the 4 different types of Sandboxes-

• 1.Developer- This sandbox will not copy the records however it can store approximately 200MB of data for testing
• 2.Developer Pro- This sandbox does not copy the data records however it gives you a storage of about 1GB of data
• 3.Partial – You get a sample of your actual data in the sandbox
• 4.Full- You get all of the actual data in this sandbox

The need for you to refresh your sandbox at regular intervals

You need to ensure that the Sandbox that you use is refreshed at regular intervals to be in sync with the production.org. When you create your sandbox, you receive a copy of the complete configuration of the production database as on the date and time in which the sandbox is created. Over time, the production.org might have things added to the data that are not present in your sandbox.

Note, if changes are made to the data in the production org, they will not reflect in the sandbox that has been created by you, so never be in a rush to refresh the sandbox. This is where you need to refresh your sandbox, and whole you do so, any old changes that you have copied to the sandbox will be replaced with the current data. This means you must ensure that you have everything you need in the sandbox so that in case you refresh the sandbox, you do not have to re-add them again if they become erased.

Move items from your sandbox to the production org

There are some cases where you want to learn more about the unique features of sandboxes under Salesforce without interfering with the actual database. However, there are times when you are working in the sandbox to incorporate new functionalities like a new object or workflow. If you have made some small changes that are few, the process of moving these items from your sandbox to the production data is very easy. You need to follow all the steps that guide you on recreating the new things in the production data. However, if you have many changes, and you want to add them to the production data, you need to choose the option Change Sets and follow the guidelines for doing so.

Follow simple steps to move changes without hassles at all

The option that you choose for changing sets is the Outbound Change Set. With this option, you can easily move many or a few of the changes that you have incorporated. You can move items like the apex code, the objects, fields, Visualforce pages, and others. All of them can be moved to the new configuration code without hassles at all. The instructions are simple for you to follow when you click on the selected option. The upload is done to the production org, and from there, you can make all the changes that you wish to do, like the Inbound Change Set.

There are some steps that you should follow for the above, and this includes making the initial connection between the production org and the sandbox first. This is how you can figure out things faster, and the move becomes simple, especially when you are shifting the configuration in bulk.